Music Video: Keegan DeWitt’s “Complicated”
One of my favorite songs off of Keegan’s Islands album. Matt Jay crafted this video over the summer of ’09 in the North Plains region of Oregon.
One of the things I love about this video is the fact that it’s so simple. Matt went out with these two actors and filmed them interacting naturally, like a documentary. No complicated lighting setups or heavy equipment was needed to create these effortless shots of a brooding romance.
Jay shot the film on his Panasonic DVX camera, a fairly old (in technology years) standard definition video camera. One of the strongest aspects of Jay’s cinematography is how he’s able to manipulate the camera to its full extent to achieve stunning images, regardless of the format. It serves to remind me that even though we have the crystal-clear capacities of high definition, standard definition still has an appealing tactile texture all its own.
I’ve always believed that a good music video is the perfect melding of musician and filmmaker. In this case, the sensibilities of both Jay and DeWitt sync perfectly to create a unified work whose disparate components seem to have never been separate from each other.
