“JyellowL - Mademoiselle” By Luna
Synopsis
''If you don't change the way you look at things / you see that nothing changes...''
Irish hip-hop artist JyellowL takes to the streets of inner-city Dublin in a traditional, horse-drawn funeral hearse. A mixed-format, tongue-in-cheek performance video for J's latest single 'Mademoiselle'.
Credits
Featuring JyellowL & Chris Kabs
Directed by Luna
Director of Photography - Kevin Minogue
Editor - Vincent McEntee
Colorist - Leandro Arouca (Element Post Production)
Grip - Martin Osbourne (Progressive Productions)
Special Thanks:
Film Equipment Hire Ireland, Fierce Fitness
Beyond the Short
We’ve wanted to collaborate with JyellowL for a long time now and we’d originally discussed making a video for a different single. When Dublin went into lockdown, however, we realised our original idea wasn’t going to be possible. Fortunately, when the restrictions started to ease, J got back in touch and asked us to have a listen to ‘Mademoiselle’.
If we’re being entirely honest, we weren’t sure where to bring the visuals at first. There’s quite a lot of big ideas and themes floating around in that track. It touches on identity, ambition, mortality, authenticity - you know, just your run-of-the-mill existential stuff! And yet, interestingly, while it touches on some pretty big philosophical themes - the tone is also quite playful and tongue-in-cheek at times. We knew we wanted to create some visuals that touched on these themes - but acknowledged the humorous side of the track too.
As luck would have it, we were driving through Dublin city together and we got stuck behind an old-school funeral procession. They were using one of the traditional Victorian-era horse drawn carriages.
Almost as a joke, we said: ‘What if we threw him in the back of one of those and had him rapping from his death-bed - as we made our way around Dublin?’
After we’d stopped laughing, we realised we couldn’t come up with a good reason not to. Also, one of the central ideas in the track is that it’s important to value the life you’re currently living. The rituals and traditions around death in Ireland are all about that too: Irish wakes and funerals are about celebrating a person’s life. So the traditional funeral hearse seemed like the perfect central image to base our video around.
With this central image as our starting point (and with the themes and ideas from the track already swimming around in our minds) the rest of the images evolved from there.
Admittedly, the shoot itself was pretty hilarious. As is customary in Dublin, the older generation tend to bless themselves when a funeral procession passes - so we had a few people doing this. There were quite a few pedestrians who mistakenly thought it was a real funeral. One woman in particular nearly fainted when she saw J sit up in there.
We hope everyone enjoys it - as we much as we did making it!
“JyellowL - Mademoiselle” was submitted to us by Nathan Fagan. Have a film of your own you’d like us to check out? Click here!