Director's Note:
I approached Seth (Blu Kobina) to make a music video, for this concept I had been excited to make for a while. I wanted to make a video based around Victor Burgin’s Office at Night photo series because it impacted me greatly the first time I saw it, and it has stuck with me since. Burgin’s ‘Office at Night’ was itself an homage to Edward Hopper's painting Office at Night (1940). I wanted to work the stillness of photography into this work since Blu’s song has a melancholic, introspective feeling that I felt matched Burgin’s work. The office setting with its allusions to anonymous workers amid endless paper work well with the young rapper asserting himself while still questioning his ambitions.
We needed an office, so I reached out to my cousin Tom, who was able to let us into his engineering office on a quiet Sunday in downtown Edmonton. No one was there, save for one lone employee catching up on work. Seth’s girlfriend was unavailable so my cousin, Mariah was able to fulfill her rap video dream and play the love interest. We also brought in my roommate, Curtis Pollard, as the antagonist. My brother and cinematographer, Bryce Zimmerman was in town for our grandma's 90th birthday, so we decided to shoot that same weekend.
To preserve the original feel of the photos, we decided to shoot on black and white film stock – Kodak 7222.
To complete the visuals, our friend and animator Taylor Peters created animations based on the spirit of the original artworks, combined with the songs lyrics, to reimagine them as moving images.
Featuring - Seth Erskine
Director - Don Zimmermon
Cinematographer & Editor - Bryce Zimmerman
Animator - Taylor Jon Peters
Colour - Sam Gilling
Woman - Mariah McGrann Uchachz
Man - Curtis Pollard
Scan by Frame Discreet
Shot on Kodak Film
Cast: Dean's Video, Bryce Zimmerman, Don Zimmermon and Taylor Jon Peters
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