“ZADA is a nomad traversing the pacific northwest landscape. She finds freedom in travel, finds family within new homes, and faces challenges with discrimination. ZADA’s beauty and power derived of exploration is stinted by restrictions and immigrant profiling. While exploring the romance of expedition, we subtly remind viewers that it’s not hospitable for everyone.” (excerpt from ‘Nomad’ visual treatment)

“We made use of practical elements like fire, flashlights, and headlights to keep the visuals grounded in reality”

The music video for ZADA’s song ‘Nomad’ was a big undertaking. With multiple shooting days and locations across British Columbia, we had to stay nimble as a production team and intentional with what we captured. From a technical standpoint, this meant keeping our equipment loadout to a minimum. We knew early on in the creative that natural light would be the primary source for most of our scenes and we would mainly need to shape the existing light. We were intentional with the time of day for each scene, and made use of practical elements like fire, flashlights, and headlights to keep the visuals grounded in reality.

“Our goal was always to shoot the project with a documentary style with handheld movement”

We chose to shoot on the C300 Mark III with Atlas Anamorphic Lenses. The anamorphic lenses allowed us to show off the scope and scale of the vast BC landscapes. Additional aerial footage was captured with a DJI Mavic 3 drone. Our goal was always to shoot the project with a documentary style with handheld movement, and create scenes that didn’t feel too ‘staged’. In keeping with this style, I chose to operate the camera on an Easy Rig and manually pulled focus. This allowed us to keep our crews sizes down, kept our camera rig compact, and gave me the freedom to experiment and improvise during takes. For the primary performance, we decided to shoot with a dana-dolly for smooth movements. This helped to visually separate the performance from the narrative and allowed us to get dynamic angles and movements.

Colours were an important piece of this project. We wanted the natural and muted tones of the landscapes to be offset by vibrant colours in ZADA’s wardrobe. Hair and wardrobe combinations were carefully selected to show a passing of time and place as her journey continues.

WATCH: ZADA - Nomad