Album covers? Check. T-shirts? Check. A groovy website? Check.
We’ve been working with St. Paul & The Broken Bones ever since the beginning, and this summer, we got to add one more checkmark to our list of collaborations: a music video.
In case you haven’t heard, Birmingham’s music ambassadors have a new album coming out in a week: Young Sick Camellia, their third album and their second on Sony’s Records imprint.
To build excitement for the September 7 release, the band needed some visuals for their lead single, “Apollo”. That’s when they turned to us.
But this wasn’t just a favor for a favor, or a band playing favorites with their hometown buddies. We had to pitch them a concept and go up against other groups pitching other ideas—just like we do with our client work. And as it turns out, we won the pitch.
“[Executive Creative Director] Aaron Gresham had just put the finishing touches on the record art, so I checked with the band’s management about what was up with a video for the first single, and our timing was perfect,” said President John Montgomery. “The motion team at Big jumped at the opportunity and put together a really great concept that we presented, and it was off to the races from there.”
Given that this was a spacey song, we decided it needed a spacey concept to fit it. That’s where Creative Director of Motion Brian Curtin and Agency Producer Amanda Paul came in.
“This song is basically a love song to Paul’s wife as he’s gone and on the road so much, so we wanted to have two ‘beings’ as a visual representation of the song,” said Curtin. “The two beings dance, move around, but can’t seem to touch. I call it a frequency dance, and Paul’s transmission is the song.”
For the band performance, Janeway did his thing. For the more surreal elements of the video, we had to do some heavy lifting, including fitting male and female “skydancers” in body suits and having them perform in a wind tunnel. We captured these two dancers against a white seamless backdrop with backlighting to give us clean silhouettes to work with in post-production.
And the finished product—well, see for yourself!
We’re quite pleased with the final video, and after seeing the buzz on Entertainment Weekly earlier this week, it sounds like the response has been, ahem, out of this world.
Most importantly for us, it’s yet another chapter in our evolving partnership with St. Paul & The Broken Bones.
“Birmingham has world-class creative talent all over the city, and I talk about it every chance I get,” said frontman Paul Janeway. “We love the creativity and continuity that Big brings to our band’s brand.”