Towards the end of October 2011 I received an email from Sam Kovar, the creative media director at the Minnesota School of Business, about a rather large collaborative effort to create a music video for local rap veterans Atmosphere.

One of the main focuses was to involve the MTS Digital Media Academy, a Minneapolis high school. The other players brought in to bring the whole project to fruition were director Nate Maydole of Visumm Media, director of photography Alex Horner, photographer Bill Hickey, designer Kate Hanson and audio engineer Nick Mihalevich.

My role would be to capture all of the goings on behind the scenes for the three days of shooting for a “making of” documentary that would be attached to the music video release. The scope grew a bit as documentary work tends to. Over the next three months, I was fortunate enough to sit in on the pitch meeting with Slug of Atmosphere and Rhymesayers CEO Brent “Siddiq” Sayers and was also there to capture Kevin Beacham of Rhymesayers speaking with the MTS Digital Media Academy students about the upcoming shoot.

The three days of studio shooting was one of the smoothest shoots I’ve witnessed. With about 25 high school students on set, it was an amazing experience to see them fully engaged with the lengthy process of putting together all the elements that would eventually make the complete video.

The students were involved in nearly every aspect, from creating art used in the video, dressing up as trees to assembling themselves in the shape of a heart, making snow fall and being canvases so many of the visual elements present in the video. I’m hoping the experience gave them further drive to pursue whichever facet of the creative arts they’re most interested in and impart a sense of the amount of work it takes.

The final music video was edited by Nate Maydole, with VFX completed by Jeremy Wanek. A release party was held at Fifth Element on Jan. 19, when the final bits of the documentary were captured. The documentary was then edited by Sam Kovar with some assistance from Trey Wodele of MTS Digital Media Academy and myself, with post audio work completed by Nick Mihalevich.

Both the music video and doc were officially released on Feb. 16. Shortly after it was picked up by The Minneapolis Egotist and also received a write up on the Huffington Post. Recently 89.3 TheCurrent had an in-studio performance with Atmosphere where Sean(Slug) spent a bit of time talking about the video. Listen to it here.

All in all it was a very exciting project and I feel extremely fortunate to have been asked to be apart of it.

Atmosphere – Became (Music Video)

Making of Atmosphere’s “Became” (BTS Documentary)