Both the single cover-artwork and music video take inspiration from John Everett Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite painting, Ophelia – which in itself was based on the neglected and doomed fiancé of Shakespeare’s Danish Prince.
In keeping with Millais, the vision for the music video was inspired by Scandinavian cinematography, especially in reference to the raw, low-budget, minimalist style that such filmmakers as Lars von Trier, Ingmar Bergman, and Thomas Vinterberg have championed in their cinema over the decades.
We partook in the use of different camera equipment and shooting styles, with the use of a camcorder and a digital camera – another inspiration of Dogme 95, a Danish film movement during the mid 1990s, that advocated filmmaking throw “Vows of Chastity” as they called it; filmmaking principles that were a reaction to the Hollywood films of the late 1980s, which in their eyes were superficial and unimaginative. Dogme 95’s manifesto tasked its filmmakers to find creativity through limitation, an antithesis to the excess and identity-driven world of big-budget cinema.
The use of different cameras is as to represent the alienated and broken figure Maddy epitomises in her single. The introduction of a Hamlet figure in the music video, who’s self-absorbed and melodramatic, his performance serves as a contrast to Ophelia’s (Maddy) isolation.
Part of Lŵp x PYST Music Video Fund