DUNYA - Yaz León

Director’s Note

I don’t love not knowing before sets. Pre-production continues to be my favourite part of filmmaking, because I see it as the best chance to address logistical questions with creative solutions.

So our approach to the DUNYA MV for @yazleonn was a bit foreign for me. I traveled to the UK to film the music video (among other things) but other than a general visual concept, there wasn’t a ton of pre-production work done. No storyboards, some references, a quick test shoot with a DV camera (a gorgeous Fujifilm Coolpix I got from @zakkabanzai) that led to us bringing in another camera (huge shout out to @johnmouratis for his beautiful BMPCC6k in such short notice), and off we went.

On the day of the shoot, we picked up a cheap oversized suit for our star @nkasante_ to echo the lyric “wears his father’s pride/like his secondhand clothes,” and put Nana in freezing cold water to get that gorgeous pool shot (sorry Nana). It was incidentally Halloween, so fortunately he in his oversized grey suit was not the strangest thing to parade around London that afternoon.

Sincere expectations and amicable trust was such a huge part of what made the spontaneity work - this is my fourth music video/visualizer for Yaz, and at this point there was enough mutual trust that we were going to figure it out, and would be able to sort out things in quick but fruitful conversations if we didn’t. It was also trusting that it would come together in the edit, which took a bit of tweaking but I’m quite happy with the outcome.

As always, a delight to work with Yaz (mostly). When we’re not making spontaneous decisions for tattoos.