The past year has been a lesson in working under strict constraints. How can you make the highest quality art from home, or with a severely limited staff, or have creative output at all when everything feels so overwhelming. Even our ability to simply move around as freely as we once did felt snatched away.
Ymani Leila and Katie Neuhof were dealing with those concerns and limitations in Fall 2020 as they were trying to conceive ideas for a music video to accompany Leila’s track “NEW WORLD.” With Neuhof at the directorial helm, Eventually, they struck an idea that not only allowed them to create a video with a small staff, but perfectly encapsulated the meaning of the song. Leila has been recording and performing for the past few years, a fresh face among Los Angeles’s electro-R&B scene. Neuhof – who has Boston roots as an Emerson College alum and former Allston resident – is a filmmaker and photographer, also currently based in LA.
“NEW WORLD” is ultimately a track about isolation and overcoming the internal darkness within one’s self. Musically, it has a downtempo but driving bassline that propels the verses towards an energetic chorus. It’s about finding a balance between those internal elements of self-doubt and the way you want to present yourself externally as a glorious being full of joy and passion for living. As you will see below, the video represents this dichotomy perfectly with a simple but effective duality.
Recently, Allston Pudding sat down with Ymani Leila and Katie Neuhof to get a full walkthrough of the video, the process that led to its creation, and its shot-by-shot meaning. This was a really fascinating, illuminating method of discussion. To have the combined team of musician and director – one to dissect the song and the other to explain the subtle technicalities that went into the video’s filming – it offered a unique dual perspective into an artistic collaboration. Read our discussion below after you’ve checked out the video for “NEW WORLD.”
___________________________________________________________________________
Allston Pudding: Let’s start with your backgrounds as artists. Ymani, when did you start writing and recording music?
Ymani Leila: Music started around the end of 2017. My partner at the time was producing a lot of music and asked me to sing over a track. I was super nervous, but I did it. It was such a good release to be able to get out what I was feeling at that time. It started from there, and he and I made an EP together. I took that stuff down later. We were able to perform it at an art show in LA a year ago. It was interesting to see how people reacted to it live. Now I’m working on a new EP that I’m mainly producing. It’s definitely evolved my sound. I got vocal lessons when I moved out to LA.
AP: Tell me about “NEW WORLD.”
YL: It has a dark vibe, and a chaotic vibe in a way, but it’s slow. It was about feeling torn. How do we go about this transition, how long is this going to last for, and trying to feel sane in a world that feels so crazy. Trying to still maintain some sort of peace in it. When I say, “I lost myself again,” that’s about me when I feel off balanced and not centered.
Katie Neuhof, Director
AP: Katie, how did you get linked up with Ymani to direct the video?
Katie Neuhof: I’m also a photographer and Ymani is a model. We’d shot together a few times, and so I’d followed Ymani and her music after that. I reached out to her about directing a music video, and she was down! We shot this all mostly in November of last year. It was pretty quick after you released the song. We collaborated on producing it and doing all our little location scouts with our masks on. It was the first thing that I had shot since COVID had started, so it was an interesting experience.
AP: How many music videos have you directed in the past?
KN: A handful. About five or six. I’ve been working to build that body of work. It’s something I want to do full-time. I think it’s about the fifth. Don’t quote me on that; I have to count!
AP: In terms of the limitations of filming a video under quarantine restrictions, how did you go about finding the location and conceiving it? The concept of the video is fairly simple, but it’s executed so well. If it wasn’t for those restrictions, would you still have gone with the split-screen concept?
KN: I think there is potential that it might have been different, but since we have been living in this world for a while, it definitely was part of the concept, just having Ymani be the only subject and having a simple, scaled-down set. There were only a few people on set. It wasn’t a big thing, which I loved, because it was very intimate but we were still able to be safe, distanced. It’s weird trying to make art in those constraints, but sometimes constraints enable you to be more creative, because you have to find creative solutions to overcome that. The concept is definitely based off the song, but it does have that isolation that quarantine brings on.
AP: The content of the video fits the song really well. Where did the idea for the dual imagery come from, one with darker imagery with more subdued movement, versus a more colorful outfit against a white backdrop with full-on dance?
YL: I came to Katie with the idea of the bow staff and me dancing. That’s all it was at first. That was really fun to learn.
KN: I loved that idea. Listening to the song with that initial idea for her, I thought about another element we could bring to this. The song speaks to duality and how there are these two sides of you when you’re going through a change. You’re struggling to be this powerful person, but you have this dark side of you, too. I thought it would be cool to visualize that in the two worlds. You have the one side of her that is struggling with the darkness, with isolation, trying to figure out what to do with her life. Then there’s the light world, the dance world, where she’s fully powerful, full realized, fully confident. I wanted to have those played side-by-side. You kind of get to have two characters from one performer. It’s like you’re talking to yourself.
AP: Let’s get into watching the video. Feel free to stop me when you wanna talk about something.
0:13
KN: In this intro here, I have the camera zooming in on the left side and zooming out on the right side. I created that to give a sense of visual distortion and a weird push-and-pull on either side.
AP: I didn’t even notice that.
KN: It’s very subtle. In the darker world, it’s zooming into her mind, and in the lighter world, it’s revealing her and her power. Having them happen at the same time is kind of disorienting.
AP: Subtle things make a difference. You do still get that feeling even without noticing the technical effect.
KN: That’s even better, if it creates a weird feeling and you don’t know why.
AP: What went into the costume choices?
YL: These are all my own outfits. For the dark world, I knew it had to be all black. I was wearing leather pants. I got that wig; I wanted long black hair. I got that contact lens specifically for one eye, a blue lens from a smoke shop. My mom gifted me the necklace a few years back. To me, it’s a symbol of myself and my spirituality. It represents life and how it keeps flowing. Even though I might be in a dark space right there, the necklace represents that light to me as well. The eye thing represents that duality as well. For the light world, that outfit is by this designer name Kim Shui. I felt like it fit for this video really well. I did the facepaint for that and got my hair braided.
AP: Were both of these shot in the same location?
KN: Yes. We shot them back-to-back. She’s pretty much in front of the same wall, it just has a different fabric. We rented a downtown LA loft space. We were shooting it in the middle of the day. There was so much light pouring through that to make the dark world dark was a little bit of a challenge. It’s the good thick blackout curtains that made it possible. The white backdrop has those beautiful, huge warehouse windows. I bought a bunch of fabric and hung it up there. Ymani did all her own styling and I did the production design. It was very DIY.
0:31
KN: Going back to the contacts being different, [the close-up on them] speaks to that duality. The video also has these 16mm interstitial transitions that are colorful. I thought that would be an interesting way to bring a little more color into the video. It’s very subdued for the most part, so I wanted to bring that color. I liked putting it into these transitional moments, because I feel like when you’re having a manic episode or a depressive episode, you’re just having these flashes of images coming at you, in your memory. That’s part of why it’s included in the video.
0:36
AP: I really like the placement of Ymani spinning the bow staff with the lyric of “while the world’s spinning.” I love when something happens in a video that clearly relate to the lyrics of the video.
KN: In my mind, the spinning feels like a metaphor for life being crazy and constantly in flux, but there she is in control of it, the master of it.
YL: Ooh. I didn’t realize until you said that.
KN: You have this moment of spinning out of control, but there you are in control of life. Life is the bow staff and you are the master of the bow staff!
AP: Adding to that too, even the dancing adds to that. It’s a skill that requires awareness and being in control of your body, having that sense of balance for the movement. I’ll definitely want to ask more about the dancing as the video goes on.
KN: You look so cool.
YL: Thank you!
1:14
KN: The makeup was inspired by warpaint, wasn’t it?
YL: Yeah, tribal African warpaint. Even with the bow staff– I don’t know when that came to mind, but I was like, okay, I want to learn this. I just learned from this man off YouTube.
AP: Bow staff spinning tutorial?
YL: [Laughter] Yeah, I was just doing that inside my home. At first, I didn’t have a bow staff; I was just using a broom. I got the neck rings online because I couldn’t find it anywhere. In my head I knew the dress needed some kind of jewelry statement piece.
KN: I love that it does have this warrior inspiration, because that’s kind of who you are in this light world, this warrior conquering inner demons.
AP: I think we also paused at the moment right before the dancing takes off and gets bigger.
1:21
AP: Back to lyrics linking up with visuals, your movement gets bigger when you sing “I’ve lost myself again.” You’ve even put down the bow staff for a second to get fully into the movement.
YL: The choreography I did myself as well, practicing big movements. I’d record myself over and over, tweak it every day.
AP: Do you have any background in dance?
YL: I have none. I’ve always loved it and wanted to take lessons, but my family didn’t have enough money at the time. So I would just dance by myself in my room all the time.
KN: It’s pretty impressive that you choreographed it yourself though!
AP: You definitely could have fooled me that you didn’t have any formal training.
1:52
KN: I like playing with these moments of extreme close-ups and wider shots. I think it speaks to how we are in her mind in the darker world, and then in the lighter world, we’re in this realization of what she’s gone through and is overcoming. I liked to play in the video between these close-ups versus these wide movements that have a lot of movement.
AP: That is a really cool effect. I didn’t consciously think of you doing that, but it’s another one of those subtle techniques that definitely elicits a response from the viewer.
2:11
KN: This moment here… this is the moment we want to talk about! Throughout the video [the two Ymanis] have movements synced up, but this is the big moment where they are sort of talking to each other. This is kind of the breakthrough moment, like the version of herself that is trapped in her own mind is speaking to this powerful version of herself. I thought it was cool to have them actually speaking to each other, because otherwise they’re isolated.
AP: Yeah, this is a really brilliant shot.
2:22
KN: Now this is such a powerful moment, the raising of the bow staff after you’ve had that intimate moment. This is the moment of extreme, fully-realized power.
YL: To go even further with the bow staff, in Okinawa, Japan, there was an emperor who took over only for a short period of time. He wanted people to use a bow staff to keep the peace and get rid of crazier weapons. I thought that was cool, having this weapon to protect ourselves, but not having it be something super wild, like a gun.
AP: It does feel like a better way. Okay, two people don’t get along and want to have an altercation, fine. Just hit each other with sticks until someone gives up.
KN: I love the idea [of the bow staff being a symbol of peace]. It’s like you have this power, but it’s not a violent power or you’re exerting violence over people. It’s an inner strength.
AP: This is also another moment where I feel like the content of the video matches up with the content of the song: right before the chorus kicks in – hi-hat picks up, intensity lifts – there’s a moment in the video that precedes that lift in energy. This time around, you’ve got the bow staff raised, and the chorus kicks in immediately after. It gives the video a really great pacing.
KN: This was such a fun day.
YL: I was so excited!
2:49
KN: I had talked about the 16mm transitions. Here, you’ll see some of that 16mm artifice going across the frame. It was all shot digitally, not on 16mm. When we were originally conceiving this, I wanted to shoot in 16mm, but it’s just so expensive to shoot on film, and we didn’t have the budget for it. It was a very DIY project. It’s cool because those constraints create a new creativity. So all this filmic stuff you see was created in post. I wanted to take my time with it to try to make it look like that and fool the viewer into believing that [it was 16mm]. Maybe that also speaks to the duality and nature of the song: that it’s supposed to look like one thing that it actually isn’t.
AP: Again, that’s one of those subtle things that I definitely hadn’t noticed. So now I’m looking out for those flashes of color.
3:00
KN: It’s doing that push-and-pull thing again that I was talking about.
AP: What I really like – about the music and instrumentals of the song – Ymani, you had said that it was kind of a slow song earlier. When it’s mostly just the bassline on the verses, I can hear that. But when the chorus kicks in, there’s almost this feeling of the music kicking into double time. I think that also ties into that duality that we’ve been talking about.
KN: It’s very dynamic.
AP: That’s kind of how a lot of this past year has felt. We were talking about manic episodes versus depressive episodes earlier. It feels like there’s less in-between with those moments; it’s either-or.
KN: I think the song and video are such a reflection of what we’ve had to go through with COVID, but without immediately noticing that. Like if you watch this video in 20 years, would you even know that it is a reflection of that?
AP: That’s a great point. I can definitely see that COVID influence, but I also think that if this had come out two years ago, it still elicits a strong feeling, a mood, a state of being. We have these inner and outer selves; how we really feel inside versus how we actually want to move around in the world, as these warriors, these people full of confidence in ourselves, but at the same time, there are these darker sides of us, full of doubt, insecurity, and fear.
KN: It’s a timeless feeling. You can always feel like that, it’s just been more pronounced in this year. I hate saying that, but it has been a year.
AP: It’s March again, welcome back!
KN: It’s always been March!
AP: Ymani, as far as the movement goes, we’ve been focusing on the light world and the more dance heavy portions, but I also think there’s a lot of intentional movement in the dark world. Right here, you’re not looking at the camera, you’re glancing off camera a bit. Can you talk more about the movement in that side of the video?
YL: I feel like I tried to feel more uncomfortable, constricted. I’m doing slight movements, but still showing that anxiety and fear. I still try to have movements that match up with the chorus, but ever-so-slight movements. Definitely the opposite of the other side.
KN: I had originally instructed her to not move at all. As we were filming it, she naturally had these movements that were so great that I said, “Ok, move how you would naturally.” I love how uncomfortable it is, how you’re moving, but you’re very constricted. It speaks to that state of mind.
AP: It reminds me of that expression, “Dance like no one’s watching.” The right side feels like you’re doing that and freely expressing yourself through movement. Then the left side – even though that is the “inner world” – it feels like how you would move uncomfortably with too many eyes on you.
KN: It’s very self-conscious.
AP: I love the last shot of the slight eye movement before a final 16mm color flash.
KN: It was so fun to watch that again. It’s been awhile. I watched it every day for a month.
AP: This is the fifth time I’ve watched this video today. But this watch – with you two telling me what went into the creative process – this was the most enlightening watch. Any final thoughts you’d like to wrap up with?
YL: Rewatching it makes me feel super sentimental. I’m happy we put this out into the world and were able to make something under these circumstances. Every detail feels so specific, everything ties together so well looking back on it. We did more than I thought we could with it.
AP: Even watching it the first time without all this context, it did feel like a very intentional video. There’s meaning to these images and the filmmaking techniques behind them.
KN: I like to tie videos into the songwriter’s vision and what they’re speaking about, rather than have it be unrelated. I had so much fun making it. It was a pretty DIY project, but I think the end product is even better than I had imagined. It’s cool to keep creating art even when shit is absolutely terrible.
AP: Even though it’s DIY, it never feels like it’s low-budget or cheaply made.
KN: It was also the day that Joe Biden finally got announced as the winner of the election. We found that out as we were getting to set. So it felt like this huge release. It gave us energy for the shoot. Not that I’m the hugest Joe Biden fan; but people were yelling in the streets. There was this electric energy that was really cool. Hell yeah, let’s make some art.