Klvdr

0:00 Thank you, thank you. Hello everyone. So my name's Calvedor. I'm mostly known for my abbreviated name KLVDR. I'm a filmmaker that works in music videos, commercials and film.

0:17 Before we start, I just want to get some context for my name. When I first started as a director, I was actually working as a graphic designer.

0:31 Before I knew what my videos were going to look like or what kind of stories I was going to tell, I actually cared more about what my name would look like as a logo. It was important to me.

0:45 So that's the reason why I've kind of like, you know, my sad excuse for dropping out all the vows in my name. Well, obviously here to talk about the video that I made for Stormzy, but I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself if that's all right.

1:05 I was born in Hararez in Barway and moved to, thank you Jay.

1:13 I was born in Zimbabwe and I moved to England at a young age of 11 in 99. Any mathematicians, just leave it. I'm not young anymore. But coming from Africa, we moved to a small town called Milton Keynes. And being quite young, the move was like a culture shock to me. And often found it's quite difficult for me to find people that had a similar story to mine. So as a young kid, I kind of interjected myself into music, TV, magazines, anything that kind of felt like it represented who I was.

1:48 Okay, we've changed the slide. But skip a few years forward into my later teens and I ended up going to university. I've got a few of my uni friends at the front row there. I went there to study graphic design, but it was this period of my life where my curiosity caused me to have a change in interest. I don't know if any of you remember, some of you might be young, but around 2010 there was like a rise in a new generation of filmmakers. Technology advanced and filmmaking became a lot more accessible, a lot more of a career path for people from much smaller financial background. I would like to say I picked up my first camera out of frustration and to be completely honest, people were giving me really, really, can we swear? Giving me shit pictures for my designs.

2:49 So I was like, I need to take matters into my own hands. Like this can't continue.

2:55 So I got my first camera and unfortunately that same year, I lost one of my close friends to a car accident on New Year's Day. And being young and not understanding how to handle grief, me and one of my close friends Rocky, who's a musician, we decided to make a music video to act of somewhat like a tribute. We felt like we needed to do something just to remember him. We had no idea what we were doing.

3:21 We made the video in one night and we uploaded it onto YouTube and to surprise for us, like it reached 40,000 views in a week and back in 2010, 2012, that was a lot.

3:37 But it that kind of pushed me into being a director. Like I didn't never want to be one.

3:44 I didn't think I could be one, but I just started getting calls to be one. There's a picture of me in a boot. My general interest in music was people that told stories very similar to the reality that me and my friends lived. Anyone that loved Graham and hip hop in the early 2000s, if they were young and out on the streets, everyone had their own lyrics. It was kind of a thing to do. But unintentionally, I always deferred away from pop or any other genre when it came to my work. I just always gravitated towards black music, which isn't the easiest way up the director ladder, as you can see in the picture. I would say that's some evidence. As DSLRs allowed us to shoot HD content, it created a change in the music, in the black music scene with platforms like SBTV, Graham Daily and LinkUp TV. It was the first time I could access music that I was interested in on demand. No more bootleg DVDs or texting TV channel to play your favorite songs or videos, once again showing my age here. But fortunately for me, working as a self-shooter, I was granted the opportunity to work with Graham Daily, which led me to grow as a director. So as the scene and the artist grew, and with the platforms, so did I.

5:12 Which brings me, or brings us to today, where I'm signed with pulse films. On the screen are a few videos of work done. My work is mainly performance based. I generally like to play with the ideas of making the artist the main character all times, especially with rap. They're like narrating the world and telling their perspective to the viewer. The top left is a video that we made for Fredo and Hedy One. We shot that in a prison. It's quite an interesting experience, just kind of making something for two artists that, you know, not long ago, they were both incarcerated. So it kind of felt like a full circle, a celebration moment for them. So that was quite an interesting project. Bottom left is a video that we made for Skepta and Jay Balvin. It's not really anything real. It's just a butler that gets killed by his boss.

6:12 And then the boss keeps killing more butlers and Jay Balvin's in the basement. Yeah, so it's like a loop. She just kills everyone that works for her. Bottom right is a video that I made from Mahalia and Koji Radical. That was really just to play on changing the stigma of a one-night stand. Like, you know, men get dapped up for doing it but women don't. So like we're just kind of just flipping the script on that. And the last one in the top right is one of my favorites.

6:46 I made it for Young Bane. I often like to play with motion control and dance and all sorts of other camera movements.

6:54 So that's some of my work. Let me stop boring you with my life story. Let's get to the shits. So let's talk about the video that I made for Stormzy. I'd like to walk you through a few things about this project and what made it so different of an experience for me.

7:18 I want to talk about the process, the briefing, the challenges, the ever-changing creative, and also what I feel is the most powerful scene. The process for this started in January 2022. The entire video took nine months to make. And that's from like initial briefing to final release. We got the call in January and it was all very, very, very top secret. I mean, my EP's there, Tina, we didn't know what was going on. Which is very different to a normal music video pitch and process. We got asked to sign an NDA and a few days later I was given a random address in South London.

8:06 I live in South London. It's not all that bad. But when I arrived, I was greeted by two members of the deaf jam team. We sat down, we had a drink, tea, it was an alcohol. And I braced myself to hear this new track. I was just so intrigued at why everything was so secretive. She pressed play and the lyrics lasted until 30 seconds into the song. The rest of the track was a beat.

8:37 So the intro is 18 seconds. So that means like 12 seconds of lyrics, so not that much. And after that, they told me to follow in. The song is seven minutes long. There's no chorus. Stormzy's the happiest he's ever been.

8:54 And we want this to be completely different to anything he's done before. Challenging to say the least, I'd say. Anyone in this room that's been through the process of making a music video knows that a director would normally sit and hear the song and live with it for a while before you even get a chance to write. And you'd get the whole song. Not just the first 30 seconds. Especially in rap, you know, context is everything.

9:22 So I wrote and kept writing. And after two months of developing the idea, we stumbled across an idea that Stormzy and I were setting. The idea was to create a visual representation of his lyrics in a form of a day in a life type thing.

9:43 So the idea of family fun, him walking his dogs, basically showing his life. It was all very personal and important to him.

9:55 So this is kind of where things got a little bit interesting. And by then I actually managed to get more access to the song, the full song.

10:03 But it was only through like Zoom call or a physical meeting with the commissioner or the head of Def Jam. So just picture me like in a meeting, scribbling lyrics down, just trying to get everything I can get out of the song. And I noticed the sound bite for the Jose Mourinho line. And as a Chelsea fan, I thought, okay, that's cool. That's interesting.

10:27 That's a bit of a statement. But later that week, I got a call to say Stormzy wants Jose on the video. So can we do that? But clearly we could. A few days later, he then said maybe people that are the best in their fields, I thought, okay, right, I don't know what that means, but we'll try and get everyone together.

10:54 And then he was like, this should feel like a celebration. So obviously I'm just getting dished things consistently. But like it was all about building the idea. Later that month, Stormzy invited me to his last show of the heavy years, the head tour at the O2 arena. And when we went backstage, I suddenly understood the enormous pool of different people from all walks of life that came out for him. It was so organic, like how one person can bring so many different worlds together. And that's when I realized the reality of Stormzy's vision.

11:25 This is an, this was an opportunity to unite Stormzy's reach in one visual project, which leads into one of the biggest features of the video, the cameos. While we're here, do not do this if you do not need to. Gathering this many culturally defining characters of a generation is not for the weak hearted. Like we often find ourselves in the tension of what I see as cameos versus creative. Firstly, it's a logistical nightmare.

12:04 Everyone is busy and you can't really get the right dates together to sync. Secondly, we were also trying to include a wealth of people that have shaped British culture, but in turn, tell a clear story of Stormzy. And last but not least, just time. Getting coverage for a seven minute track with no chorus, no dance break, no bridge, no lyrical story is incredibly time consuming and especially for a freestyle, you have to kind of see every line that he says. So with that, the cameos began to build.

12:39 I didn't want to create a video just with a bunch of faces. There needed to be some sort of context of how Stormzy comes into everybody's world, but also keep this feeling like a Stormzy video. Hence why the Jose scene feels like a football team in formation, you know, that type of stuff.

13:03 So we added and what was just one cameo of Jose Mourinho turned into Jonathan Ross. It was only right that we created a TV show scene and in that TV show, we carried on adding and we added the likes of ZZ Mills. We all know Louis Faroo, Dina Asher Smith and that was the TV scene and I thought, okay, this is great. We've got star power. We're good. No.

13:38 More adaptions happened to the song and we got an inkling that stylo G was available, but he was based in Jamaica. So after more conversations, stylo G was then added to the mix and then another random call happened and Stormzy's team were like, yeah, you same bolts around. I was like, sick. How are we going to do that? But, you know, we showed him through Zoom, so it was all good. Lovely guy, by the way.

14:16 So we added him to the mix and then as the idea developed and time passed, the avalanche came to fruition and it was when we was in the edit and making something that's like seven minutes long, especially a Stormzy video, it's quite fast pace all the time. So you kind of end up running out of steam quite quickly. So moving to new scenes is what keeps the pace up, keeps things interesting consistently. So a few days of shooting in, we realized that we needed to do another shoot day.

14:49 So I decided to add a scene that paid homage to what has inspired this generation. I was keen on keeping the foundations of what and who Stormzy is as a person.

15:05 So I remembered a moment from his Glastonbury performance.

15:12 So this is kind of what inspired me to make this scene. So many different artists that paved the way from Wiley, Dizzy Ross, Skepta, Gibbs, Getz, Retri 2, Kano, Chip, Tiny Tempa, Liefu, Bizzu. There's been so many legends that have paved the way for me, but there's a bag of us coming through right now. So that was the clip. And the idea was basically to create a scene that shows the timelines of basically then and now in all levels of black entertainment, from fashion to sports, journalism, music and more. So once again, started adding more canvass.

16:03 So we added Jazzy B, Ian Wright, Trevor Nelson, Walea Diomi, Clint, Lil Sims, Dave, Nella Rose, Julia De Luga, Jenny Francis, Mallory Blackman, Henry, No Signal, Tiana Major, Gabrielle, I'm gonna keep going. Hedy Wan, Jeremy, Mega Man, from So Solid Crew, Posty, the founder of Graham Daly, Brenda and Tanisha Edwards, the mother and sister of Jamal Edwards, rest in peace, and Rashid Khazra, who is basically the founder of Linkup TV.

16:52 In this day and age of TikTok and fast paced media, we live in a place where this type of video shouldn't really happen. It doesn't sound like a good idea, but I remember Stormzy saying to something to me on the first day, and he said, there's no rules, bro.

17:14 I want you to make this as long as you want. So even though this scene was built to go over the track, we ended up stopping it in the edit and giving it its own moment. We then invited Retra E2 to pen the monologue in reflection to this scene, which acts as a time capsule of Black British heritage.

17:39 And then we were honored with Mikaela Cole to do the voiceover.

17:45 This is what the scene turned into. Today, we speak about foundation. Many great Black influential giants have touched people from soul to soul throughout many generations. It's often the word greatness comes to mind, but football and legends like Ian Wright make greatness come to sight. Our DNA empowers us. We can make a song and dance out of anything. Our genes are enriched. It seems there is not a seam out of place in our fabric, and people.

18:13 And although sometimes we may be introvert, we're all alone in this together. Brothers and sisters, families in business, flipping the script, screaming from the rooftops, echoing the unheard voices and writers. This time will be timeless. So with or without signal, we're major. Gabrielle once told us dreams can come true, and that sentence emancipated the minds of our pioneers. Brick by brick, a safe house and garage was opened in each community. Self-sustainable and vulture resistant. Self-belief meant that the culture was left in the hands of the culture, and the revolution was re-energized the moment it was televised. I need to remind you this is not a phase.

19:03 This is phase one. Almost lights camera action after take one. This isn't divide and conquer. This is provide and prosper. This isn't destroy and rebuild.

19:13 This is I love my future more than I hate parts of my history. You've seen what we put together when we come together. You're living in it. So let us rain in honor of the wind rushing through our veins, leaving suffering and pain. Will we ever be the same? Not any storms could have weathered the storm, but when you are who you are, you can't run from the journey, the expectations or the destination. We're here now. Thank you. One more time. I've never worked on something that's been so sporadic and continuously developing.

20:20 To be honest with you, this video kind of grew a life of its own. It was so dependent on availability of all these high profile people and at times it felt like a never ending task. The one thing I learned from this process is that rules are meant to be broken and you're not always going to be clear on what the end product is going to be, especially in the music video. In turn, after a long journey of making music videos and rapping grime, for me, this feels like a love letter to the scene that I've grown up in. It was just an opportunity to show what's been built over the last two to three decades in black British culture. I'm not here on this stage because I was taught to be a director or that I had lots of money or came from a family in film. I'm purely here because of my curiosity. As we sit here in this room, as creatives, or just as people, I feel like that is something that we all have in common. So with that, I would say stay curious. Thank you very much.