With “Everyday Life,” Coldplay wanted to make a music video that embodied the message of their song — unity, humanity, and the simple beauty of life. The objective was to capture humanity across different settings, culture and religions and for these scenes to ultimately come together and display the beauty of being human. The situation was that this had to be done with limited resources. Due to the amount of shoot days and travel, there were limited resources for this project. Therefore we had to find creative solutions to capture the video using a very small crew and limited gear.

The idea for “Everyday Life” was to capture beautiful, human moments across different countries, races, religions and cultures. The vision was to convey that, while people have their differences, they all share the beautiful experience of being human. Ultimately wanted to make a video that was equally poetic in its visuals as it was in its message.

While it would have been incredible to travel to a dozen different countries to fully showcase the beauty that Earth has to offer, there were not enough resources at hand to achieve that. In our planning, we identified three countries with distinctly different cultures that we felt would be beautiful to capture: South Africa, Morocco and The Ukraine. These three countries were all very different, from their visual appearances to their religious and racial demographics.

The music video was filmed over the course of two weeks. Coldplay was shot over one day in Los Angeles, and then the production team travelled to Cape Town, Casablanca, Marrakech, and Kiev, in that order. We travelled with a core team of a producer, director, cinematographer and editor. Due to limited resources, we used very small additional crews during our shoots abroad. There was no additional camera crew or grip and lighting team. Every scene was shot with natural or practical lighting and the cinematographer operated the camera by himself. Steering away from traditional direct to YouTube releases, the video first premiered on South African community TV station Soweto TV.

The video has garnered over six million views since its in the three months since its release. It received publicity and acclaim from publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard and NME. NME described the video as “moving” and “beautiful stuff.”