Asking Katy Perry to eat a giant slice of watermelon on camera was never on Joel Kefali’s to-do list.
But that’s where the Kiwi music video director found himself during the shoot for Perry’s new song, This Is How We Do, with the results described as “bright, colourful and simply cray-cray”.
Since being released on Friday, the video from Perry’s new album PRISM, which she will tour here in December, has more than 7.8 million views on YouTube.
In it, as described by Rolling Stone, she “enters a hyper- stylised, pastel-soaked pleasure dome,” populated by animated tacos, twerking ice-creams and pop-art inspired designs.
“I didn’t put her through her paces too hard,” jokes Kefali, who graduated from Auckland’s Unitec in 2005 with a design degree in fine art and animation.
He has found his work in increasing demand in the United States since directing Lorde’s Royals last year, which has had 315 million YouTube hits.
“There were definitely a lot of cold calls from labels and artists and complimentary emails after that,” Kefali, 30, said from his Auckland home yesterday.
“It has definitely helped my work. I think that is what the Lorde project has done for a lot of people.”
Earlier this year, Kefali approached Doomsday Entertainment in the US to see if they would partner him on a video for an artist he was working with. He was signed as one of the company’s artists, and Perry asked him to do a script treatment for her new single – which she loved.
“My idea was to make a pop video but to keep some edge to it, and make it feel like it was pop art,” he says. “We did a studio- based shoot where we used lots of animation and props, and then each line of the song had its own little vignette.”
It was in complete contrast to the moody, washed-out video he did for Royals, but it was important to capture Perry’s aesthetic, he says.
“If you look at my work [those] are probably the two extremes, and everything else I’ve done probably falls within the gap of those two jobs.”
Perry was easy to work with, Kefali says. “She’s great, she’s got a good sense of humour, she’s very creative herself and she had a lot of ideas and involvement in the shoot.”
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– Sunday News
