The lyric video for Loosely by Lunalay

This project began as a request to produce a Spotify Canvas. I promptly yes-and’ed it into a lyric video. My thought being, if we were going to shoot a little video, why not shoot a little more and have enough material for social media promotion and YouTube.

I asked for the song and lyrics, which I read while I listened. Necessary because I can’t follow the lyrics in music. Not for lack of trying. Lord, that would make this process so much simpler.

This is what was conjured in my mind:

HFR (high frame rate) close-ups of a box of matches, lighting, sparking, going out, trails of smoke.

A simple visual theme directly inspired by the chorus that could be shot in a few hours. We borrowed a friend’s house with a nice big window--our only light source. We borrowed another friend’s vintage matchbox collection. And bought far too many matches.

I rigged the camera so it could be mounted on the tripod portrait or landscape. This allowed us to quickly reframe a scene from Spotify/social media to lyric video. Our biggest time sink turned out to be getting matches to light. We resorted to cannibalizing a new box’s striking surface and attaching it to the vintage matchbox used on camera.

We did so well on time that we added an unplanned head-on shot. It was left on the cutting room floor, but did give us this little blooper. Far funnier in the moment after striking hundreds of matches.

A production of only a few hours resulted in a Spotify Canvas, a library of clips Lunalay could use for social media, and a full lyric video to further promote the single. I’m going to ignore that postproduction took 10x the amount of time.

You can see the Canvas by streaming Loosely on Spotify, like the social clips over on Lunalay’s Instagram, and watch the lyric video on YouTube.