Adée - Hold It Against You
Not long after I’d met Adée in Sweden last September, we’d started talking about potentially collaborating when she was working in the UK in November. I’d pitched her a rough idea I had for a music video inspired by the methods and mindset of BROCKHAMPTON.
It was something that had been rattling around my head for all of summer, that idea of how fast we consume new content and how quickly it becomes irrelevant - post something on Instagram right now, it’ll be so far down everyone’s feeds in a couple of hours, a lot of your followers/friends/family won’t see it.
Shout-out to Instagram’s algorithms.
Using Adée’s hotel room as a location, we talked about the message/meaning behind “Hold It Against You” and how we could use that to influence the video. The double entendre of Adée having gone from hotel to hotel to hotel lately, always packing her life up to move it on to somewhere new, and the fact the song is talking about a break-up - it all seemed like a cohesive idea.
I knew I had the image of Kevin Abstract sat in a chair in a hotel room in the music video for “1999 WILDFIRE” as a launch pad for whatever we wanted to do, so it seemed like a good idea to go from there. We played the song over and over and over to time where Adée would walk and what she would do as the song progressed.
The aforementioned shot of Kevin Abstract, click the image for the video.
It’s surprising how your mind expands or compresses time when you think about how long it’ll take someone to walk from A to B or pack a bag, or put in an ear ring.
Once we nailed down exactly what Adée was doing for the song, we practiced with me following her through the motions - making sure the camera was exposed correctly as much as possible, framing on each action before fluidly moving to whatever was happening next, and not getting caught by any shadows or reflections.
Due to the flooding of lighting in the bathroom, I had to switch up the shutter speed before we entered the room and after we left it, so there’s a subtle covering of the shot during following Adée to hide that.
I think we nailed it with the second run-through of the song, but we ran through it all a couple more times. It was pretty straightforward along with the edit. What became obvious to me in the edit was how heavily I breathe when i concentrate.
Adée was over the moon with how it all turned out, I was pretty nervous about it because I knew there was no fixing the video if it wasn’t up to scratch with different shots or cutaways. The fact she loves it, makes me prouder of the end-product - she took a huge risk on trusting me with the concept, the reasoning behind it, and the execution.
But I think we stuck the landing.
I’m incredibly grateful for Adée giving me the opportunity to try something new and different, and the fact she always just gets on board with whatever I want to try.