Over the past two months, I have been working on creating a music video and promotional package for Moncho Berry’s song, Zoo Lion. My music video takes the viewer on a psychedelic adventure as a young woman frees herself from the expectations of society and goes on a journey to find herself. Society is constantly pressuring us into a box and I hope to have designed a piece that reminds others that we can leave that box whenever we want.
Zoo Lion is a song that falls under the bilingual alternative/indie genre. The artist, Moncho Berry has songs in both English and Spanish and he often incorporates modern genres with afro-peruvian rhythms to create his music. This specific song is mostly in english though and would best be marketed towards an english-speaking audience considering that it matches the language and that there has been increased interest in foreign musicians in recent years. For this reason, I based my research on alternative musicians in the United States. Much of my inspiration for the music video came from smaller artists like The Big Moon’s Why video, Declan Makenna’s Humongous video and Børn’s Electric Love and WE DON’T CARE videos. These music videos have creative and often artistic concepts and are characterized by their formalist elements and stylized visuals. Animation and collage styles are also very common in these art-focused pieces. The Zoo Lion music video includes all of these components in its tone and aesthetic. I used animation techniques and photographs to make the video feel like a moving collage and give it an innovative touch.
Unfortunately, my research did indicate that it is very common for the musician to be the main subject of the video. Sadly, due to covid restrictions, I was unable to physically contact the artist so I went for an entirely story-driven piece instead of a partial-performance piece as is customary. Most of the time, the audience is able to see the artist experience the content of the music video, but my video never features the actual artist, making it more difficult for the audience to create a connection with him.
Considering that I chose to market Zoo Lion to an alternative audience, I knew that they would be a niche younger crowd mostly intrigued by uniqueness and aesthetics. The target audience for my Zoo Lion video is ages 16-34 with an interest in the arts and a dislike for convention. This is why I did my best to create a stylistic piece with a unique narrative and visual design. Knowing that the viewers would most likely belong to the Gen-z generation, I was also sure to make an interactive instagram page with reals, videos, artistic posts and some hashtags to attract them most effectively.
The target audience dictated much of the content and artistic style of the music video. I knew that they would not be impressed by high production values and perfection; this crowd prefers a home-made look with ideas that they have never seen before. This is why I allowed my imagination to run wild and was sure to create a piece that creates an individual experience for the viewer.
I was able to create a ‘brand’ for the song through visual cohesion in all of the elements of my promotional package. The album cover, music video, and social media all have a visual relationship through similar fonts, graphics, and colors. I used a memorable yellow, hand drawn ‘squiggly,’ font on all of the pieces to create a sense of harmony and indicate that they are related. I also used the backgrounds from the music video as the tile background for the social media posts to allude to their relation as well.
The brand is best established in the music video itself while the instagram page and album cover are supplementary to it. Since most of the visuals are animated, the video does the best job of expressing how all of the different graphics work together. The different graphics would have looked somewhat unrelated in the social media page grid, so I augmented the music video visuals to give them a “galaxy-space” theme and posted those on instagram, giving the page a more complete feel but still maintaining a visual relationship with the album cover and video.
In this piece, in a broad sense, I aimed to represent the group of people that feel trapped by who they are. Either emotionally or in a physical sense, this project is meant to speak to those who feel like they cannot be their authentic selves. More specifically though, this piece represents Peruvians. By having both a Peruvian subject (my sister) and a Peruvian artist (Moncho Berry), My Zoo Lion video is attempting to propel the Peruvian voice forward and make their presence known. It is not very common for Peruvian artists to have audiences in the United States and my promotional package is focused on bringing Peruvian art to the United States. To highlight this, one of the settings in the music video and a special social media post were dedicated towards Perú.
Regrettably, representation was not a major focus of the project and both of the causes mentioned above are touched on indirectly. I lament not making these topics more prominent in my piece as they are important and my target audience would likely have enjoyed it too.
Overall, I am incredibly proud of the piece I produced and reflecting on the past few months has made me realize all of the new things I have learned as a director, writer, and especially editor. If I were to do this project again, I definitely would have put a little bit more time into the social media aspect of the project and created visuals specifically for the page instead of mostly using graphics from the video. Additionally, it would have been awesome to have worked with the artist and gotten the experience of directing a musician. In the end though, I didn’t even know I was capable of making a video like this and the experience of learning to do it as I went has taught me so much.
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