@RenMakesMusic

1 year ago

Filming Animal Flow.



Let me set the scene.



It’s a cold gloomy British February. 



A great start to any tale.



I’ve been sitting on this track Animal Flow for about a month, it has this tribal rolling drum sound, reminiscent of early Kanye production (you’re allowed to say his name again now he said sorry after watching 21 Jump Street)

I’ve got this annoying problem where if I’ve created something challenging to create the next thing has to be even more challenging to pull off. We’d just finished filming a series of one take videos for the Sick Boi album, they were a bitch to film, because if anything goes wrong in a shot with only one continuous take all the way through, you have to start again. I love that challenge. It forces my performance to be engaging for the entire piece. If a tiny thing goes wrong you have to start again. I sadistically really enjoy the frustration of the entire crew when we shout CUT and have to start the whole bloody thing again. Their little faces sinking into despair fills me with a little warm fuzzy feeling inside every time. “FROM THE TOP! ACTION!”



I decided I wanted to make the most ambitious one take video yet. Throw in as many moving parts and as many people into the mix as I could, and even add a little dance choreography.

This was before my music had ‘taken off’ and I’d just left my current management, I was pretty broke, so I also had to pull this off with no money. That made it even more exciting.



My friend Benny had this apartment that he bought off my Spanish friend Raffa. The parties in this flat were pretty legendary and appropriately full of debauchery


The hallway to the apartment looked like something out of a Kubrick film, and I instantly knew I had to film there.

I kept thinking of the movie Eyes Wide Shut.



I asked Benny what he thought about me turning his apartment into a jungle. He smiled, he agreed.



Me, Benny and a few friends headed out into a cold February night in the early hours of the morning dressed in black, with some gardening shears, a hatchet, and some bin bags.



We spent hours hacking at overhanging weeds, ivy, whatever we could find, filling up bin bags. What I didn’t know, but found out during the Texas plant massacre is that Benny used to be a botanist. He told me the Latin names for each of the plants we mercilessly shoved inside the bin bags. What we definitely didn’t do for legal reasons was borrow some unusual looking exotic plants from a botanical garden at 1am.



We returned to the apartment and spent the remainder of the night Covering the walls in plants.

Ivy - or to use its Latin name - Hedera Hibernica - looks great parcel taped to a white wall.



We then created a makeshift torture rack out of a clothes rail, painted the bathroom in faux blood, and filled the bathtub with red jelly, naturally.



The whole apartment took a few days to totally transform into a magic mushroom Orwellian fever dream, it was perfect.


I had acquired about 80 latex animal masks and a gorilla suit from amazon, and acquired about 80 friends and friends of friends insane enough to agree to take part in the shoot.



What ensued was hours of pure chaos, an apartment hall littered in people in latex animal masks while horrified looking neighbours walked passed. You’d walk out into the hallway and see a man in a wedding dress with an ostrich mask riding a lowrider BMX over the carpet. Walk into another room and people in Dog masks playing poker were doing shots of tequila and smoking menthol cigarettes. Everything was going exactly as I intended



Somehow, during the chaos, we managed to film a music video.



Sure it was about 4am when we got the final take, and we’d started filming at about 7pm, but that’s not the point, we got the shot.



My friends left, scarred and broken shells of who they used to be, and I left with one hell of a music video.



Animal Flow drops at 8pm GMT on Thursday



I hope to see you all here for the Premier!

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