Porij 'My Only Love' by Maxi Mclachlan
Rob Ulitski - 22nd Jan 2024
Maxi McLachlan directs an emotional montage of loving moments in their new promo for Manchester rave-pop outfit Porij, featuring lead singer Egg Moore.
The video for My Only Love contains a mixture of DV footage, photography and subtle effects, with charming and clever transitions between the different formats. The result is a video that is both fast-moving and heartwarming, riffing on how images capture moments and fuel memories and emotions.
It's a lovely video for a lovely track, packed full of dreamlike energy - and McLachlan has created created a real 'how did they do that?' aspect with the transitions, as a result of their smart planning ahead of the shoot.
"Once I stopped my emotional head-bobbing to this absolute corker of a beat, I started really listening to Egg’s lyrics and discovered this is a love song that focuses on the evanescent nature of our emotions," McLachlan explains. "Love is potent and all-consuming but often exists in sparks, moments between us that are special but inherently fleeting.
"This sounds like a real downer but I think that’s what makes it magic. I became really interested in how photos evoke this, we take them to literally attempt to capture a moment so we can look at it again, even hold it. I came up with the idea that I wanted to show Egg travelling between snapshots of love between real couples, friends and lovers, jumping in and out of photos.
"We had a pretty small budget, so Samuel (my DP) and I spent several days running around London with a DV camera filming lovely friends that volunteered to be in the video. We didn’t have any specific plan, we just wanted to film real moments in a documentary style. Then we had to rapidly select some of our favourite frames and send them off to the printers - who hated me after I sent them over 300 frames to be printed ASAP - ahead of our studio shoot the following Monday.
"I didn’t want the video to be cynical at all. There’s plenty of work exploring our photo-taking obsession, especially in the age of smartphones. I wanted this to just celebrate the joys our modern access to cameras can bring us. My hope is that it gives anyone that watches it a nostalgic, fuzzy feeling and makes them remember some special people. Lord knows there were plenty of them involved in the making of this!"
Rob Ulitski - 22nd Jan 2024
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Credits
Production/Creative
- Director
- Maxi Mclachlan
- Producer
- Maxi Mclachlan
- 1st AD
- Matt Chandler
- Runner
- Tatiana Moody
Camera
- Director of Photography
- Sam Donvito
- Focus Puller
- Owen Diplock
- 2nd AC
- Will Marchant
Lighting/Grip
- Gaffer
- Meg Sharpe
Art
- Art Director
- Emilia Mendez
Editorial
- Editor
- Maxi Mclachlan
Commission
- Commissioner
- Roisin Page
- Label
- Pias / Play It Again Sam
Rob Ulitski - 22nd Jan 2024