Babylove — Music Video

Baby Love is a music video for Petite Meller, commissioned by Island Records and directed by A.T. Mann and Napoleon Habeica. Meller dances through the Kenyan landscape with the Wayo Wayo dance group — saturated colour, wide skies, a chorus of kids — and the video did much to set the look she became known for.

The credit is a producer’s credit from before In Color existed. Baby Love was produced by Jonny Kight and Tal Baltuch at Black Kight Films, Jonny’s first production company, and the credits say so. It is on the reel because it is the start of the thread: a small unit, a long way from home, a director’s treatment carried from budget to delivery by one producer.

The shoot ran over four days in late November 2014, based out of Nairobi, with Kate Arizmendi as DoP, Will Jasper as first AD, local fixer Simon Ball on the ground and camera from Hot Sun Films and A List Production in Nairobi. Edit was by Ornit Levy and colour by Tal Baltuch, both working between Tel Aviv and New York.

A music video is produced differently from a commercial: the label commissions, the director’s treatment leads, the budget is tighter and the schedule shorter, and the producer’s job is to make the ambition fit the money. Shooting abroad on that budget means a small, mobile unit and a local partner who knows the ground — which is still how In Color approaches international music videos.

We’ve kept it on the reel for its rawness — and because it took us to Kenya. Jonny Kight’s music video credits include Blur ‘Lonesome Street’, John Newman ‘Cheating’, Jessie Ware ‘Tough Love’, King Krule ‘Easy Easy’, Bat for Lashes ‘Laura’, The Saturdays ‘What Are You Waiting For’ and two further Petite Meller videos, ‘The Flute’ among them. For how we produce music videos for labels, artists and directors today, see music video production.

Outcome
Released 19 January 2015 by Island Records. Behind-the-scenes coverage in Wonderland; credits on IMVDb.