Blake Mills Surrealistic Home Video for "Five."
by Olivia Forney 7/30/2019
Critically acclaimed producer and musician Blake Mills released his third solo album, “Look“, back in November. Recently, he premiered a music video to accompany the song “Five“.
Directed by Justin Daashuur Hopkins, the video is subtle, poignant, and eerie, exploring the concept of assigning emotional weight to unusual objects such as insects, flowers, turtles, and fire. By using expert cinematography techniques paired with Mills’ dramatic yet somehow subdued guitar synthesizer compositions (which are the hallmark of the entire album), Daashuur Hopkins pulls the audience into a peripheral world. Detailed shots that document the smallest of movements, changes in light, and graceful panning call on our inner selves to assign narrative and emotional identity to that which we normally wouldn’t- objects that we probably wouldn’t even think twice about on any given day. In watching this video, you might find yourself wondering what inner turmoil an insect is feeling, where exactly a turtle is yearning to be, and whose name a fire is softly whispering as it crackles, jumps, and fades. Daashuur Hopkins achieves quite the incredible feat of feigning the skeleton of a plot and letting the audience fill in the blanks on their own.
Blake Mills’ newly released video for “Five” is compelling and filled to the brim with dramatism without any assigned plot – a sobering look into ecosystems and micro-narratives that occur in the periphery of human experience.