Finneas' Lotus Eater Music Video: Phantom Thread Influence

As CG and AI videos have become cheaper and more ubiquitous – and as the incentives of YouTube, Instagram and TikTok algorithms all shape the platform –certain formats – great music videos can sometimes seem like art that needs a home. Even as more of our media becomes visual, it's tempting to move around in filtered stills, send camera effects back and forth through keyholes like a pet zoomies, use bite-sized visual effects and call it a day.

But within the form there is so much more space and so much more creative freedom. Director Isaac Ravishankara has now collaborated with Finneas on three music videos, all with the goal of feeling like “the best three-minute scene in a movie you love,” Ravishankara told IndieWire. “You’re able to take the vehicle of form and make a scene out of something larger, a window into something larger.”

In the latest window that the director and the musician have created together, “Lotus Eater”, Ravishankara also managed to persuade Emmy-winning cinematographer Christian Sprenger to return to the world of music videos and, for the best, a retrospective, extreme to create a cinematic look -scene in the film that they built.

“We really tried to lean into this very real, almost anti-pop music video feel,” Sprenger told IndieWire. That meant shooting on 35mm and using many lenses, lights and techniques that would have been as present on a set 40 years ago as they are today. “It refers to an older era. We don’t use soft LED lighting or expose things digitally,” Sprenger said.

All choices were made to emphasize a timeless atmosphere, a party in the house of an indefinitely rich person in a borderline place between night and morning, drunk and sober, loneliness and love. “There's just the tiny glimmer of a party, but you catch the end of it. That’s where the darkness, the strong contrast and the grittiness come from,” said Sprenger. “We lean [into] orange firelight and the neon background and having that kind of pre-dawn darkness outside and that moment.”

It's an idea that came about when Ravishankara and Finneas listened to the music on his album For Crying Out Loud, as opposed to the normal process where a director pitches a concept to an artist, which is then paired with a specific track.

“As Billie [Eilish] When she makes music videos these days, that's what she imagines [Finneas] makes a song and then makes her own music videos. But he said that that wasn't really his world and his interest. He wants someone else to come up with his ideas,” Ravishankara said. “The first two ideas we had were something karaoke-like in the lyrics and a kind of magical, realistic floating where he's being pulled around, which largely came from the melody where he has these sustained notes.”

Both fit fairly seamlessly into the track-like logic of the “Lotus Eater” video, but are things that excited Sprenger precisely because they're the kind of interesting, organic decisions that would be noticed to death if more producers would look over their shoulders.

“I find [the music video process] comes close to what we all aspire to, like classic auteur cinema production. What is so rare and so fleeting and so hard to find. But [in music videos] There are really only a few people who creatively oversee the project. And as long as the artist is okay with it, it’s an idyllic creative process,” said Sprenger. “You really have room to explore and experiment and take really big risks.”

Even to the casual observer, the risks may not even seem like risks. Sprenger and Ravishankara both praised Finneas' willingness to adopt a sort of disheveled, up-all-night look for the video, or even being willing to exist in a world that's super dark and vivid. “He really puts a lot of trust in me and the people I involve to create something good, and then he shows his full commitment at different points in the process and then is just a great performer on set,” Ravishankara said. “I just really believe in him as an actor.”

Part of the fun of the “Lotus Eater” video – and music videos in general – is that the collaborators can pack it full of the things they love and believe in. Given the kind of out-of-time throwback setting, Ravishankara and For the look of the world and the connection established in less than three minutes between Finneas and another partygoer, Sprenger has lovingly borrowed from sources as diverse as ” Before Sunset” and “Phantom Thread”.

“Ty, our production designer, even brought balloons the same color as in this scene [from ‘Phantom Thread’] because I sent them this as a reference: “Oh, this feels like it has a great after-the-party feel.” You know, this ballroom is obviously much grander, but it still has that feeling as if it were just two people in one world,” Ravishankara said. “The beauty of this video, more than anything, was that we took the idea of ​​where the scene started and then hopefully ultimately led the audience to this really beautiful and charming, emotional ending.”

The fact that “Lotus Eater” is able to do this in such a compressed time frame is equally a credit to the visual imagination, the music behind it, and the collaborative process. “When I was starting out in my career, I always saw music videos as a place where everyone starts out and then everyone is desperately trying to get out to make money and work on bigger things or with big stars or whatever,” said Sprinkler. “Now, a little later in my career, I see music videos as a place where you don't make a lot of money, but you can express yourself creatively in a way that you can't achieve in many other formats.”