Ninian Doff Shows Us The Raunchy Life Of Bugs

Music videos have always flirted with NSFW content. Aside from the provocative outfits and states-of-undress both singing chaps and chapettes find themselves in, more often than not it’s the quite literal interpretations of ‘romantic’ content that can cause a YouTube blush or two. However, you think you would be safe in the world of nature – after all, how risqué can a bunch of bees and plants be? Well, under the cheeky eye of Ninian Doff, very risqué indeed.

For the official video for ‘Love Again (feat. Gangsta Boo)’, a track from Run The Jewels’ groundbreaking sophomore album, ‘Run The Jewels 2’, the artists worked with Doff and production company Pulse alongside JASH, ​the comedy collective from Sarah Silverman​, Michael Cera, Tim Heidecker​, Eric Wareheim and Reggie Watts​. Pairing beautiful high definition footage of butterflies and bumblebees engaging in colorful floral pollination alongside Killer Mike​, El­P​, and Gangsta Boo’​s playful and provocative sexual lyricism, the result is a remarkably shocking yet humourous view of what nature gets up to when it’s feeling frisky. Shot and edited in a gloriously hip-hop style, the vid is as NSFW as it is delightful!

We caught up with Ninian, fresh from his double-pencil win at D&AD, to chat about macro photography, getting performances from bugs and kinda inventing a new fetish…

How did you get involved in the project?

I don’t often do this but it was as a result of me proactively approaching them. I love Run The Jewels and so Sara Boardman (head of music videos at Pulse) reached out to them to ask about a possible video. That got the ball rolling

What gave you the idea for the vid? Did it take much to convince the band / label?

Well as mentioned I reached out to them and so part of me receiving this track felt a bit like they called my bluff! As in “oh yeah, well try and make a video to this then!”, ha ha. I just remember many re-listens to the track and reaching the chorus wondering what the hell to do. Two reasons really: firstly how to be clever and surprisingly not too literal but at the same time you can’t ignore those lyrics. Secondly the track is very clever - Gangsta Boo’s final verse flips the whole thing on its head and tramples all over decades of cliched hip hop misogyny. And so the idea had to reflect that as well.

Once you had the idea, how did you deal with the logistics? We’re big fans of your work in the past, but none of it screams ‘macro footage of nature’.

We ended up filming it in a studio in Bristol with people who normally would be filming beautiful BBC Nature documentaries! Rod Clarke, who shot it, has spent the last 20 years filming for David Attenborough, so we were in good hands. What really got me excited though was he has bespoke made macro wide angle lenses. This meant I could do hip hop style shots (nice big wide angle “performance” footage) on tiny insects. These lenses are one of a kind which is why I was able to get such a unique look. 

How did you capture the footage? What kind of preparation did you need?

All experts we spoke to on this recommended we needed to give ourselves lots of time to capture this. So making this be a tiny crew bought us time. The entire crew was myself, Rik Green (producer), Rod Clarke and Nick Pitt the 'insect wrangler'. That meant we could make it a 5 days shoot which we absolutely needed. Insects are very odd things to film - especially if you want to try and elicit a performance out them. They seem to have two modes: completely still or flying away.

In terms of the construction of the video, how much did you have in mind before the shoot and how much was formed in the editing? Were there shots you weren’t able to get?

The whole thing was pretty much scripted as it plays out. I knew the edit would sell the emotion - in reality the insects don’t do much. We just cut it to make it seem like they’re doing more than they do. The beauty of the 5 days meant we did get everything I wanted. There were a few nice surprises - moments the insect would do something even better than I hoped. For example the freaky windscreen wiper antenna that flicks to the beat on the butterfly’s face. I had no idea that anatomy existed, and that it was going to happen on those shots. Also the bee got suuuuuuuper into loving those flowers - way more than I could’ve hoped.

It feels as though the edit almost works like a musical – the lyrics being attributed to the ‘characters’. Was that present or just our fevered imaginations?

That was all worked out in advance. There’s actually a very detailed animatic and storyboards. That was our road map on the shoot. So I could look at it and know we still didn’t have a good close up of a proboscis unrolling yet.

You’ve kinda created insect porn here. We dread to ask, but… did you do much in the way of research?

Insect porn is in the eye of the beholder. All I see here is beautiful, sensitively shot nature footage...

If there wasn’t much to research, do you think you’ve created your own sub-culture here? How does it feel to be a pioneer?

Somewhere out there is a really horny person dressed up in a flower outfit crying tears of joy that I made this flower. I definitely delivered hard on someone's fetish.

When you get a track like this one, which has overtly sexual lyrics, do you consciously look for a way to avoid literally representing the subject on screen (to, you know, avoid making actual pornography) or is it more that you have a ton of crazy concepts floating through your head and hearing the song connects the dots?

Yeah definitely the challenge was (and always is) to avoid the obvious. For a while I was trying to make this idea be at a cellular level and shoot it through a microscope! I was talked out of that by people who think things through.

What’s up next for you?

Some commercial stuff, there’ll be another music video certainly. I’ve also written a screenplay, so I’m in the initial stages of a feature film project, which is exciting.