SYNC x StART Festival: Century Egg, Crossed Wires & Mikaylaa States
Friday, March 24, 8:30pm
The Bus Stop Theatre, 2203 Gottingen Street, free
The Atlantic Filmmakers' Co-operative and Forward Music Group have connected two artistic communities via SYNC, a program matching filmmakers and musicians to produce low-budget, high-resource videos.
Screening as part of this weekend's fourth StART Festival—the free event also features performances by the artists—the videos are disparate as you'd expect in vision and aesthetic, but all of them exceed the limits of their budgets: $600, plus donated services.
The videos include Century Egg's "Ki Swui Kya" by Chris and Susie Shapones and Crossed Wires' "New Year" by Riley Lamarche and Tyler Leblanc. T. Nicole Holland helmed "Right Moves," from emerging R'n'B artist Mikaylaa States, produced by Jessica Smallwood. It evokes 1990s hip hop videos, cutting between the artist singing her demands and a b-boy (Yohan Black) trying to meet them with his moves.
"It is a sexy song, so I wanted it to be sexy," says Holland, sitting in the AFCOOP editing suite in her sock feet, working on the final edit. "I didn't want to make it creepy. Basically the idea I pitched to her was that it would be a sexually empowered woman. It's, you know, 'Can you make the right move?' She's challenging the guy: 'I know I have it but who's got what I need?'"
Holland, who works in the local film industry, pulled in local talent wherever she could—the performers wear shirts by Art Pays Me and Hull rocks a Citadel hat, and she enlisted smallFORTUNE's Cavell Holland as choreographer. While the shoot was a challenge in terms of time and resources, she lucked out with her star. "Any problems we were having," says Holland, "I was like 'It's fine, Mikaylaa knows how to work the camera. She was giggling sometimes and it actually really worked for the video, because I wanted it to be sexy but kinda playful."