Typhoon Music Video

We were exhausted. It was the last day of a grueling SXSW and the night before we had stayed up all night singing, drinking, and dreaming with a past Blogotheque band.

That morning Typhoon was already late for a very important show and only had thirty minutes to spend with us. They had played a ton of shows that week and were growing excessively tiered.

Any responsible set of people would have rescheduled this session for another time. Normally, that would have been the smart thing to do.



But at this instant, we couldn’t have cared less about what seemed “smart.” We HAD to do this session at THIS moment. It was too important for all of our creative energies. So we rushed over to the band as fast as we could. They were staying in a hippie house just outside of Austin filled with all sorts of hidden treasures. And as luck would have it there was a giant tree in the backyard.

Without hesitation we organized the Typhoon army, all 10 of them, in and around this wonderful dreaming tree. Softly Kyle Morton starting singing and from that moment on his powerful voice orchestrated every move.

SF Giants Commercials

The month of February is my baseball month. A little too early to play ball, but our time to come up with new creative for The San Francisco Giants. All I do during this month is eat, sleep and drink Giants. A job that aint too shabby, especially when you're dealing with a team stacked with such great characters. A bunch of "outcasts and misfits" as coach bochy likes to call them...

After the World Series win last season we wanted to communicate something extra special. We opened the campaign with this "Anthem" where we introduced our tagline for the season, "Together We're Giant."



Once the season started we started running a bunch of fun spots like the ones below...

eBay Group Gifts Video

Recently I was given the task to write and direct a short video that explained what "eBay Group Gifts" is.

We needed it to be short, fun and informative. I chose to do it in animation because I think live action "how to" videos can be pretty lame, even when they're short.

The client seemed to really like the video. They even redesigned their entire landing site based on the characters that we created.

Stars Music Video

If I would have to describe my early twenties in song it would most likely play a lot like a Stars song. That’s because nearly everything I did during those days, I would do it while listening to Stars. I would write, study, run, snuggle and most importantly, party, to Stars.
Stars is a band that enchants you. Their live shows are unapologetically dramatic, filled with energy and wrapped up with a weird sense of nostalgia. We’ve had an opportunity to shoot Stars a few times throughout the years but we never quite aligned until this moment. That night while I was getting ready to meet them, I remember thinking to myself, “I have to get them to play Your Ex-Lover is Dead.” I had come up with different reasons and approaches as to how I was going to get them to play it. But to my pleasant surprise, the first song that they suggested to play was this one. That’s when I knew that this night was going to be special.



We jumped in a cab and headed to North Beach, a beautiful part of San Francisco, filled with old beat generation artists, poets and drunks. It was fitting. It was perfect. It was Stars.

La Blogotheque Music Videos in Mexico

In August I directed a bunch of live music videos with what we considered to be the best bands in Mexico. Below is a selection of my favorites...

The first video that we filmed in Mexico: a charming duo, a combination of beautiful voices ... and a bullfighter, Leopoldo Casasola.



We should have filmed The Plastics Revolution in the Condesa neighborhood, in a place more or less normal for a Take Away Show: A street, a shop or a home ... The circumstances (or abuse of mezcal!) decided otherwise: due to a disambiguation and a strange misunderstanding, we found ourselves in Xochimilco. And we never regretted it.



We wanted to shoot Carla Morrison: Max had made ​​her a virtual declaration a few weeks ago and we had collectively fallen for her beautiful voice. There was however a major obstacle : Carla lived in Tecate (next to the United States border) and we had not planned a trip that far up north. So it was Carla who came to us in Mexico City. And we are very grateful.



We got lost in Guadalajara, the streets were all alike: the same fountains, the same low-rise buildings, the same bright colors on all fronts. They played "Shine." Their music was more universal than we had imagined, evoking the sounds of the world with every note. We were in Guadalajara, but we could have be in Cairo, Delhi or Copenhagen ...



Small unstable steps, unsteady leaps, a game of perfect balance to this sweet song with frailty and mischievousness...



To find more of the Mexican Take away shows click here.

The Plastics Revolution - When Rockers Meet Mariachis

Xochimilco is a big neighborhood from South Mexico City which is about an hour from the city center. A neighborhood – under Unesco’s World Heritage label – made of canals, remains of lakes and swamps that used to be the very historical part of the city before it became the huge Megalopolis we all know now. A strange Venice, dedicated to flowers, in which you move by taking trajineras, big, colored, richly decorated boats driven by the local cousins of venice gondoliers.
We were supposed to meet the Plastic Revolution people early morning so we had time to enjoy the touristic place. They arrived with a few friends and much enthusiasm, bossted with the energy you can feel on their record, wanting to give a great show. Each of them is still a student, and two of them, living abroad, had rescheduled their return to Mexico so they could arrive earlier and take their time to rehearse acoustic versions of their songs for us. With their joyful bikingual rock, we were expecting lively, pepsy tunes, a sweet FOLIE ? We were fulfilled.
On those boats, we had seen many tourists, families, hanging out or just sharing big lunch. Many vendors came to us to try and sell us souvenirs and weird drinks. The Plastic Revolutions were playing, and couldn’t care less about what was around, as if they just melted into this environment. We just loved those unique, precious moments. Then we met a Mariachi band on another boat playing music to earn a few pesos by playing music for the tourists. It’s been easy : they quickly agreed to leave their traditional songs and to take possession of ‘Light of day’. within less than two minutes, they got the rythm, the chords, and thus they started to play this song they never heard before.
There was only one take, and this was just unique moment to feel the magical of unexpected meeting, the pleasure the musicians had when they played altogether, the sparkling eyes as people smiling on the bank. The Plastic Revolutions were crazy, the Santa Cecilia Mariachis pleased. The most beautiful improvisation we had on our trip…

Directed by Arturo Perez Jr.
Sound by Francois Clos
Text by Julien Courbe