About this video
The Song: To me, Toy by the band Young Fathers sounds like the poetic waxings of a person before they do something they’ll regret. The intense lyrical soliloquies are enhanced by choral chanting and repetition, should be matched by an equally intense visual form. Ideation: I began to envision aspects of film noir and cell-phone video to create a highly stylized sequence for a hopelessly passive viewer. I wanted to portray a loose narrative of somebody going somewhere they shouldn’t belong and have the projected lyrics be the violent undertone that flavors the whole work. In a previous project, I had developed an unused process for creating grungy typography. This salvaged process of chaotic type design, projection, and noir cell-phone film would be a pairing that I felt perfectly embodied the uneasiness of the song. Design: Lyrics were written upside-down with the non-dominant hand many times over in varied styles and with different pens. The result had an inherent nervousness and pleasurable destruction of familiar words and letters. I feel that the handwritten text forces one to envision the hand which wrote it, and my attempts at distorting the legibility of the letterforms, hopefully, allow the audience to imagine a gross author.
About Reed Sullivan
Credits
Reed Sullivan