Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Mateo's "Underneath the Sky" Chapter 1



MySpace
artist Mateo is a good friend of mine. In November of 2008, we got together and talked about collaborating, doing a few no-budget music videos for a mixtape he was making. We were trying to think of something, other than just doing standard videos, and I suggested doing something similar to what I had done on the The Ronnie Day Project.

Why not do a narrative mixtape? Take the format and tell a story with it. We talked more about it, came up with the idea of doing four song chapters, I suggested maybe we do something very noirish, a mystery. Make Mateo this noirish-MOD styled character investigating the disappearance of former love.

Mateo took that rough outline and went to work on the story and the songs. In February, he finally had the mixtape finished and we set out to produce the video. We had no budget, my XL-2 camera (which is, at this point, so obsolete it's not even funny) and the strees of LA. And this is what we came up with.

Quddus, former MTV VJ, is Mateo's manager and he had this to say about the idea: The fact is though, chapter one of U.T.S. is actually groundbreaking. Mixtapes are usually just a random assortment of songs without much of a concept but Mateo created a cinematic mixtape that actually tells a story through songs and even has a video/short film to go along with it. It's so dope I wish I could take credit for it! He came up with it on his own though. He got some help with the music from his producer JL Brown and his director Joshua Caldwell pulled off a great video.

Enjoy!

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