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What do you do when your big plans for a music video shoot in London have to be canceled due to a global pandemic? If you’re singer Noah Cyrus, the answer was a no
“It completely blew my mind to see what people were creating in ‘Dreams,” so we decided to get together and make a video for my song ‘July” using PlayStation 4,” said the Sony Music Entertainment recording artist in between shooting mini hoops at home during quarantine with her dog Spike cheering her on.brainer.
Far from getting discouraged, Noah and the Sony creative team rallied to create a groundbreaking project that turns the art of music videos on its head — with the help of a DUALSHOCK®4 wireless controller, Sony RX0 II cameras, and some other amazing Sony technology. The centerpiece of the effort, the third in the Sony Collaboration Series, was ‘”Dreams,” a game creation system developed by Media Molecule and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for PlayStation 4 in February.
The Collaboration Series is an effort by Sony to bring together its artists from different disciplines to create new types of art using Sony technologies. A hub for community-created games, art, and music, ‘Dreams’ allows players from around the world to access tools to create and publish their own content.
“You are basically free to create pretty much anything you can imagine, and it’s completely crazy that this is possible on a PlayStation 4,” said Martin Nebelong, a freelance 3D artist who joined the official ‘July’ music video creative team.
The group also included Media Molecule co-founder and art director Kareem Ettouney and other Molecule developers. Their goal? Nothing less than defying “the laws of gravity and dimension,” said Cyrus.
No pressure, right? Working from their bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens, the team set to work, talking extensively with Noah over Zoom to flesh out the story and inspiration. Over the last few months, the developers, using the cloud-based ‘Dreams’ to collaborate, set to work sketching, painting, and animating the music video for “July.”
“The meaning behind the song, beyond just outlining a toxic relationship that I had been in for too long, is this uncertain path you get put on when you make certain decisions,” said Noah. “This ‘Dreams’ video took the lyrics and the visuality behind those lyrics to a new level involving pure nature and mankind. It became less about the actual story that I’m telling and more about what the symbols, messages, and themes from that story mean when they interact with mother nature and the universe.”
The developers’ Zoom chats with Noah proved fruitful when it came to building upon the original concept, she said.
“Even talking to them about how I wrote the song in Bali was important because someone on their creative team was aware of The Ring Of Fire, which you’ll see inspired a scene in this new ‘Dreams’ video,” Noah added.
Ettouney, the Media Molecule co-founder and art director, said the philosophy behind the ‘Dreams’ user experience is based on “flow, expressivity, and playfulness.”
“Audio, music, logic and animations all co-exist in the same system, in real time, leading to very fast prototyping of ideas and trying different things out,” he said. “It really enabled our collaboration as a remote team.”
What makes the story behind the official “July” music video even more remarkable is that none of this would have been possible without ‘Dreams,” which was released only a month before the pandemic hit.
Though she acknowledged being skeptical about its capabilities at first, Noah said the final product blew her expectations out of the water, and the process as a whole has changed the way she thinks about the intersection of art, music, and technology.
“It definitely exceeded my initial vision,” Noah said. “It introduced me to new forms of technology that go beyond traditional forms of music video and content creation. I’ve been messing around with the game these last few weeks too, and I could see myself creating mood boards or live touring visuals with the system as well.”
