As CG and AI video have become cheaper and more ubiquitous — and as the incentives of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok algorithms all shape platform- specific formats — great music videos can sometimes feel like art in need of a home. Even as more and more of our media becomes visual, the temptation is high to move around filtered still images, pass camera effects back and forth through keyholes like a pet with the zoomies, employ bite-sized visual effects , and call it a day. But there’s room for so much more, and so much more creative freedom, inside the form.
Director Isaac Ravishankara has now collaborated on three music videos with Finneas , all with the goal of feeling like “that best three-minute scene in a movie that you love,” Ravishankara told IndieWire. “You are able to take the vehicle of the form and make a scene from something bigger, a window into something bigger.” On the latest window that the director and the musician have created together, “ Lotus Eater ,” Ravishankara was also able to tempt Emmy-winning cinematographer Christian Sprenger to return to the world of music videos and create a throwback, extremely cinematic look for that best-scene-in-a-movie they were building.
“We were really trying to lean into this very real, almost anti-pop music video feeling,” Sprenger told IndieWire. That meant shooting on 35mm and utilizing a lot of lenses, lights, and techniques that would’ve been as present on a set 40 years ago as today. “It .
