CLANDESTINO / MANU CHAO & CALYPSO ROSE - 2019
directed by Regis Raffin
creative direction by Vincent Roche / animation by Maite Xia
The original Clandestino song by Manu Chao is a classic and a track that is deeply connected to my teenage years, so when he decided to do a new version I felt extremely honored to be asked to do the music video for it. And the fact that the video gathered more than 2 million views and won the “best music video of the year” award at Prisma in Rome was the icing on the cake. The song is about the people who have to flee their country to survive, it's unfortunately still a very universal subject so I wanted to have an art direction as simple as possible to evoke human beings and not people from a specific country, race or time period.
Before going further with my long time collaborator and art director Vincent Roché I start as usual by sketching storyboards to establish the visual grammar and overall narration. After researching photos on the subject matter, I saw horrible stuff of course but among that there were always little pockets of hope : kid's playing, people playing music together, parents protecting their children. When I got the idea of a boat made of human bodies, I felt a really deep emotion and I knew this was the symbol I was looking for the end of the film.
