After 070 Shake was featured on "Ghost town" by Kanye West, she reached out to me to do a video for the first single on her debut album, MODUS VIVENDI.

There was never a proper brief, instead: Shake and I spent countless months getting to know each other's tastes and style, so that the idea felt more fluid and less forced.

The objective: What was the most innovative, visually captivating way that we could bring her album and lyrics to life? re: "Nice to have" ... "someone to care for you..."

Although executing a music video in a traffic jam was an idea that had been brewing in my mind for a while, no song fit the setting as smoothly as "Nice To Have" did. Surreal and heart-breaking, it was crucial that we focused on not just Shake- but on the relationships in and out of each car.

Set in the heat of a surreal, ethereal traffic jam (a semi-homage to Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Godard's Weekend) we wanted "Nice To Have" to depict a slow moving magical passage through time, relationships, life and death.

We specifically wanted to shed light and focus on the people and relationships in each car, van, bus, truck etc. Shake explicitly didn't want to star in the video as the main protagonist re: that's why she doesn't show up in the video until about a minute in...

From birth to childhood, to rebelling teens smoking pot, to star crossed lovers... to marriage, family and then finally: death... We wanted the lyrics to match the visuals, both literally and metaphorically.

We wanted to capture this vision in a very cinematic, voyeuristic and visceral way but also re: the second half... in a very gritty, emotional and handheld way.

For an extremely fine-tuned, choreographed treatment such as this; we had to make sure that the prep was just as fine-tuned and perfectly choreographed as the video was meant to be itself.

The strategy was to execute a wildly ambitious, technically challenging ONE SHOT (using motion control) that dipped, swung and levitated in, out and above a number of aesthetically different looking/ shaped cars and demographics of people... finally resulting in the heartbreaking cause of the traffic jam: 070 Shake's floral demise. All shot on 35mm film.

For the second half of the video; we would then give way to a much more gritty, mumblecore type of filmmaking. With the use a 16mm bolex film camera, our plan was to capture the more genuine, human side of things: Shake's frozen, death scene but also; reactions from the onlookers and bystanders in the traffic jam as they wait.

Although we discussed a myriad of ideas over the span of many months; we had an exceptionally short timeline to properly pull things off.

Pre-production started about three weeks before the shoot date. Not only did we have to shut down an entire tunnel, but we had to find one. This resulted in many 4am scouts to tunnels all over the Los Angeles area.

Once finding our tunnel, we then had to go through an extremely grueling casting process of both cars and people. With the beautiful lay outs and designs of the tunnel, composed by our brilliant art and camera team, it was then just a matter of making everything fit...

We had one, long night to get everything right. In the midst of over 75 extras, 35 cars, farm animals, dogs, kids and a multitude of different demographics of people, we wrapped just as the sun came up.

After releasing the video it was immediately awarded with high praise, acclaim and admiration.

It was quickly selected as a Vimeo staff pick and then later that month featured as a Vimeo staff pick Best of the Month, where it screened at the Vimeo HQ in NYC.

It was awarded one of the three silver medals at the 1.4 awards in London and

on top of that, It was just recently selected to screen at the SXSW film festival in March of 2020.

To name just a few, the video was also featured on a number of highly respectable websites and film collections including the Directors Library.

It also featured a beautiful write up on Promo News that described the piece to be "A brilliantly directed and produced tour de force. Not quite a daydream or a nightmare, more a haunting mix of both..."