French musician Rone has made a habit of pairing his elegantly chaotic electronica with ambitious, clever, and striking music videos. Both “Parade” and “Gravity” featured a story about a floating girl, which was told using skilful editing, while “Bye Bye Macadam” was an animated shamanic odyssey. Rone continues this tradition of exceptional videos with his latest release, which is off his upcoming EP Tohu Bonus.
Tohu Bonus is due out on July 1st and features six tracks: two alternative versions of previous songs, two new ones, and an interlude. This first release from the EP is the dance floor-filling “Let’s Go (Wild Edit)”, a track that you’ll no doubt be hearing plenty of in fields across the globe this summer. Speaking about the edits Rone says: “My tracks develop as I play them live, I like to fiddle with them a little, let them take on a new persona”.
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The video for the track is directed by Julien Carot and takes place inside a house experiencing zero gravity as it rockets into space. We emailed Carot a few questions to find out more.
The Creators Project: How did the collaboration with Rone come about?
Julien Carot: Well, he’s my brother-in-law. He makes music and I make video so it came naturally. But I hope that he didn’t trust me only for this reason.
It seems like the video is a continuation of the floating theme we’ve seen in previous Rone videos. Where did the concept to explore a house and its floating contents come from?
In fact, it was more the continuation of a music video that I made before for Principles of Geometry, where people were leaving earth with buildings—skyrockets. Maybe the floating theme just finds it’s way to Rone’s music.
Can you explain how you went about creating the zero gravity VFX. Was it all CGI and green screens or did you use some in-camera special effects too?
No there’s no green screen at all. All the characters were hung in the house with wires and carried by people, then I erased the cables in post production. Sometimes they are lying on a rolling cube too.
Sketching out the video
The main character in the video seems to be going about the house in a pretty nonchalant manner. It looks like the day after a house party or something. Was the idea to present this unusual situation in a quite commonplace and lighthearted way, with a lot of visual puns?
You’re right, I tried to do something fun, but I didn’t want to at the beginning. Alex from Infiné [Rone’s record label] forced me to do it this way. He pointed out to me that when you look at the people at a Rone concert they’re all smiling, and that it’d be nice to find this in the music video. Personally, with this concept, I was thinking of people who cross the Mediterranean hundred people to a canoe. Not really fun. And I had the idea to shoot the film in an African refuge camp in Paris. But Alex made me take a U-turn and I think he did right. It works better like that.
Shots of a scene before and after the post producition work
Were there any films, TV shows, animations or any fiction that inspired the piece or some of the visual gags?
Probably, but not consciously. Maybe the liquid coming in bubbles in Tintin Explorers on the Moon. But since I finished the film I keep seeing a lot of the different scenes everywhere. The man on the bike making electricity in Soylent Green, an old lady sat on a couch floating in space in a Maurizio Cattelan magazine. A woman taped on the floor too in the same magazine. And flying pasta in a generic French TV show named Cauchemar en cuisine.
