At YDA headquarters in Paris and London we’ve got this video on replay on South African Sam Coleman’s first music video Come to the Dancefloor for the band Freshlyground. Here we talk to the former creative about his move to directing.

A quick resume of your past experience that led you to directing please. Was directing always the end goal?

I’ve been art directing / creative for the past 7 years, starting out working on adidas Original’s at 180 Amsterdam for 4.5 years then moving on Mother New York for a couple of years, but I’ve always felt the most comfortable on production, working with photographers, and especially on film projects with directors & producers. So I’ve dreamed of crossing over for a long time. And on my last visit to Cape Town the conversation with Giant Films began and progressed, so here I am, back home to make films.

What were the key lessons you learnt as a creative dealing with directors and production teams that you hope to apply to your own experience as a director?

Its almost the other way, I apply my experience as a creative in dealing with the agency & clients, as I know what they need, having been on the other side. As far as directors and producers go, there are no real rules, in my experience, they’re all different, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great ones.

You’ve shot your first music video for Freshlyground, Take Me To The Dance. Will you be directing commercials too or do you plan to focus on music videos?

I’m going to focus on commercials and music videos with some short films in the works too. Both the commercials and music video formats are very rigorous and a great way to fast track film making experience. But I have a view towards features ultimately.

You’ve recently returned home to live and work in Cape Town. Do you feel your cultural experience living abroad informs your work now and in what way?

I think I see S.A with fresh eyes and you get a kind of broader view living and working in different places I think. I’m back here to make films because the content for me is very rich here, but it’s about packaging it for a global audience.

Your Freshlyground video is clearly rooted in South African culture and yet it speaks to an international audience. Can you also tell us please how the video’s narrative evolved, it’s a performance piece but was your response to the lyrics?

It’s definitely a response to the track. It represents a departure for the band in terms of their sound, a little bit darker and more now…so it called for a certain treatment.
The track had a magical and slightly darker than usual feeling for Freshlyground, so it’s kind of a literal interpretation – Take Me To The Dance, but seen through a slightly off or twisted lens. I wanted to make a rich, distinct world for the video. A dancefloor where anything goes, maybe a litte twisted at times but also somewhere you would have a great night out.

I knew I wanted the characters on the dancefloor to be very eclectic and represent a good cross section of South Africa and I feel that this was delivered by the casting. I was blown away by the variety of people that showed up. Cape Carnival Minstrels, strippers, kids and their mama’s, androgynous types, cross dressers, roller girls, zombie shake dancers, booty dancers and everything elses inbetween all showed up.
You would never get a mix of people like that showing up to a casting in L.A or London. And they drove the result. The atmosphere on the dancefloor is real.

The idea also came from the narrative in the lyrics…but at the same time the track has a dream-like quality. And a driving motion. It is firmly set in the night. The palette is dark. With the subjects lit “on camera flash style” coming out of the darkness. Black & white. It has a driving motion. The groove is infectious. The idea is that everybody who hears it lets loose all inhibitions as we see on the dance floor. I wanted Zolani to be part of it but also to be almost removed at the same time which gave it a dream-like quality.

Dance features stunning lighting. How did you get such a rich black and white tone – was that in the grade? What did you shoot on?

We shot on a mix of Alexa, and Red for the high speed stuff. So we had a rich base to work off already but still, we spent many many hours in the grade. The lighting was actually pretty loose, but we kept it moving & dynamic.

What were the main challenges of the shoot and how did you overcome them?

The shot where she enters the dance floor and begins that journey is over a minute long and I had a rough idea but the choreography of the shot was pretty much done on the fly, and trying to make sure Zolani, the singer, who is tiny, stayed in front of the camera while people were going nuts was tricky, not to mention myself and the steady cam operator Gustavo Penna and DOP Michael Cleary were running backwards through it all, trying to hit our marks. But the atmosphere on the dance floor was great which gave us the results.

 Link: Sam Coleman