Director Bellamy Brewster (www.bellamybrewster.com) recently completed work on a new music video for Halima. The Cocoa Body video has the look of a hot and hazy club, with strobing lights and fit dancers surrounding the artist as she performs the track from her upcoming album, “Sweet Tooth.”
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According to Bellamy, who is based in New York, the project marks a continued collaboration with Halima, having worked with her a number of times in the past, including on last year’s Ways music video. In the case of
Cocoa Body, the video was shot over the course of a 12-hour day at a studio in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood.
Roy Garzon and Jordan Kaya handled choreography, and musician Oludaré Bernard, who plays djembe on the track, appears in the video too. Halima, who grew up in London and now resides in Brooklyn, says the project was inspired by her time in Lagos last year, where the kinetic energy from the clubs she visited stuck with her.
“I always carry the diaspora in my mind, in everything I make,” she shares. “Working with Corey Smith-West on the production and Bellamy Brewster on the video was amazing because we all understood this and wanted Cocoa Body to be a celebration of our diasporic cultures coming together.”
The video was shot by Peter Garajszki using an Arri Alexa Mini camera and made use of several lighting techniques. A single light was positioned off-camera and moved around throughout the shoot, to create the intense feel of a club's strobe and the hypnotic effect it can produce. The choreographed scenes with Halima and her dancers were lit using a three-point setup.
The video was edited by Oli Chen using Adobe Premiere Pro and came together over the course of two weeks. Brewster then spent another several days fine tuning the color grade, boosting the saturation in Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve.
"We had a lot of room to play," he says of the raw footage, noting his intent to simulate the look of the Nigerian club scene. Brewster went for a color grade that was nostalgic, saturated, grainy and gritty.
"We've all been a wallflower at a bad-ass place that we wished we could be a part of," he says of the setting they aimed to create.
According to the director, working with past collaborators, like Halima, and his own production and post team, is like having "a massive cheat sheet" that can dramatically help to save time and money on a production. By the time the edit had gone through three or four revisions, they were very close to what they wanted to achieve, and were then able to finesse the piece by having the drummer appear multiple times, as well as altering the timing on some of the footage.
"It was a pretty smooth process," he shares of the experience.