Jake Butler

Santiago Echeverry

FMX 499 Senior Project

My senior project was centered around a music video. I directed a music video for an unreleased song called “Jelly Nicotine” by a band called The Spring. A childhood friend of mine is the bassist in the band and we had recently reconnected after working together on a short film. I had spoken with him about making the music video for the band and he was very enthused. After speaking with the rest of the band members, they were all on board. I received the rough mix of the song at the end of the summer of 2021 and began my pre-production. Rose Caltrider and Jean-Baptiste Hansali were my directors of photography and the script was co-written by myself and Josh Parrish.

The idea for the music video stemmed from my personal mental health experiences over the past couple years. When I had spoken to the songwriter, Manny Fawcett, I had found that we had many shared experiences in that department and he was very on board with the concept for the music video. The song is all about the dissociation one feels when going through those feelings, “Jelly Nicotine, the feeling that you give me. Was it all a dream, or in my head?” I came up with the character of Puppet Ryan after my own inner criticisms that I thought about myself during that time. I wanted the character to be a non-human character to really push the fact that he is just in Ryan’s head.

Once shooting was complete, the editing began. The final project has an overall resolution of DCI 4K. I played around with the aspect ratios throughout the video, something I have a pension for doing in my previous work. I find that changing the aspect ratios, if done right and in moderation, can help build upon its emotional beats of the piece. I also played around with the color. Since one of my classes this semester was an independent study on color in Davinci Resolve, so I knew I wanted to focus on the color grading of the video. Each segment of the video has its own distinct style and I did my best to evoke the right emotions with the color for each part. After I balanced the pier scene and the bedroom/kitchen scenes, I pulled down the saturation a little bit and tried to push the greens and blues to cool the image. The field scene was supposed to be very disconnected from reality, so I desaturated that scene even more and raised the gamma and the lift to give it a dreamlike appearance. Similarly, the Black Box scene was also supposed to take place in a dissociative state, with the only window to reality being the big screen displaying the newscast. Although, with the newscast already being a hallucination, it creates a question of where the daydream ends. I also crushed the lift to give the appearance that the scene was taking place in a void-like space.

Originally, I had also intended to create a vertical version of the music video. This would be a version that is optimized for mobile distribution across platforms such as TikTok and IGTV. I completed that edit, but due to technical difficulties, I wasn’t able to render it. I hope to work through those issues in the coming weeks and get the vertical video ready to release.

The final part of my project was creating a website to host my professional portfolio. The spotlight piece in my portfolio is the music video. There is a page on the website dedicated to the making of the music video. I also created pages dedicated to the work I’ve done for the Tampa Tones a cappella group as well as the short films I’ve worked on as an editor. The website takes what I’ve learned about interactive distribution and gives my work a place to be explored.