Premiered at the MTV Music Video Awards (MAMA) nominee announcement held on 21 September in Johannesburg, the music video for South African music artist Khuli Chana’s One Source showcases audaciously bold and proudly African visuals like never seen before.
Produced by Egg Films along with global digital marketing and advertising agency Native VML for the alcohol brand Absolut, One Source is the first track from Khuli’s upcoming concept album, a musical collaboration with multiple African music greats. “I’m reinventing myself,” says Khuli, “I’m traveling the continent on a search to find something new, to make something meaningful, a game-changer.”
The visual film for One Source is part of the follow-up campaign to last year’s Africa is Absolut campaign, which won Silver for Native VML and Arcade Content at the 2016 APEX Awards. In keeping with the pan-African theme, the music video features Victoria Kimani from Kenya, as well as Ghana’s Sarkodie and VVIP. Directed by Egg Films’ Sunu, the concept for the video grew as a collective effort when Native VML and Absolut came up with the idea of Khuli collaborating with various artists across the African continent. “When they approached me, I brought the visual language for the film. I delved deep into my secret inspirational folder that houses all these images and ideas I’ve always wanted to do but often felt were too wild and too crazy for the conventional advertising world. Both Native and Absolut gave me free reign to do whatever I felt was right as long as it pushed the boundaries. They didn’t want safe or conventional. It was a dream brief,” explains Sunu.
Sunu, who has always loved music and making music in particular, was also a producer on the track. When Khuli sent him “a hook for the song,” he says he knew immediately that it was I song that he could help to develop, especially since he had already constructed a visual picture for the song. “He let me run with it and it went from there. I changed some of the structure and laid down other sounds and instruments, developing it with my editor as we started editing the picture. I saw the song visually so the layers I added were about creating a song that could be heard visually, if that makes any sense,” he says. “It made a massive difference that we had the visuals in the can while producing the song. I feel the visuals actually inspired a lot of what you hear in the track and helped us push the audio to make it as visceral as the visuals. Khuli and I agreed that the song would almost be the soundtrack for the video rather than doing just a song and trying to figure out the visuals later. One hand fed the other and vice versa.”
Shot in various locations in Accra, Ghana, DOP Rory O’Grady shot One Source using the Amira, primarily taking a handheld approach throughout. Sunu says that the idea was for the video to possess a sense of immediacy and a visceral aesthetic: “We wanted to capture the scale and intimacy. Above all, we wanted the people of Africa to shine, hence a lot of portraits where you can look deep into the people of Africa’s eyes and see this passion and fire burning.”
With fire being at the centre of the visual aesthetic, when watching the video – with its brightly coloured flames and unconventional imagery throughout – it is almost unbelievable that everything, but a change of colour to the flame, was achieved in camera, yet this is so. Sunu says that there was “no room or time for toys” on the shoot, “The only thing we did in post was flip the flame from red to blue. Dave Oosthuizen at Deliverance Post was an absolute master and creative genius in working on at least 107 flame shots to bring that vision to life. The idea of turning the flame to blue was exciting and easy to come up with in the middle of the night, but it took the genius of Dave to swing those colors to where we wanted them. The grade and look was also something I worked hard on with Craig Simonetti at Pudding.”
According to Sunu, the message of the One Source music video is that “Africa is the birthplace of humanity. It is the birthplace of creativity. It is the heart of lightness. We need to celebrate who we are and stop playing the bridesmaid.”
As the song’s lyrics go, “Africa ain’t no jungle… It’s time we made them listen.”
