Melodic Yoza “Ride On”
Vintage Music Video, 2008
- Role
- Director & editor
- Relationship
- Six years into the Mark Shine / Melodic circle, begun with the 2002 Dance Pon Di Corner cover
- Target
- A music video about homelessness, shot on the street it is about, in one day, with the public in it
- Constraints
- 2008 · one shooting day in New York City · no casting, no extras budget, no permits to stage a crowd — participants were invited on the fly, on the sidewalk, in the moment
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye — direction and editing; Dan Zimmer — camera
- Time-to-dispatch
- Shot in a single day and delivered 2008
- Result
- A released music video for Melodic Yoza with hundreds of New Yorkers invited into it on the day — watch it on YouTube
- Principal
- Melodic Yoza
We filmed this music video for reggae artist Melodic Yoza on one day in NYC, on the fly inviting hundreds of people into his music video about homelessness.
Subject: homelessness, addressed directly rather than atmospherically.
Schedule: one day. All of it.
Location: the city, as found.
Casting: none. Hundreds of people, asked on the sidewalk, on the day.
Camera: Dan Zimmer.
Directed & edited by: Nick Charney Kaye.
Consent is the production design
A video about homelessness can be made two ways. The common way points a camera at people who did not agree to be a texture in someone else’s record, and calls the result authenticity. The other way asks — every time, on the street, in the moment — and accepts that the shot list is now a negotiation with strangers rather than a document you arrive holding.
This one took the second route, hundreds of times in a single day, and that choice is the look of the film. Nobody in it is furniture. Every face on screen said yes to being there, and the crowd reads as a crowd of participants rather than a scouted location, because that is exactly what it was.
The tradeoff is real and worth naming: you cannot pre-light a crowd you have not met, and the schedule collapses to whatever the street gives you between one conversation and the next. What you buy with it is a film about people that did not treat people as set dressing to get made.
Same circle, six years earlier and three years earlier: the Dance Pon Di Corner cover and Mark Shine’s “I’m a Butterfly”.
Defiance without nihilism, says the manifesto: we challenge systems, not people. A song about homelessness is aimed at a system; the production that shoots it should not turn around and use the people on the other end of that system as free production value. Ask. Then roll.
Directed and edited by Nick Charney Kaye with camera by Dan Zimmer.
Proof: watch it on YouTube.
