How Coldplay's video is a window on the world(s)

How did the concept for this collaboration come about?

Our video is part of Coldplay’s 'A Film for the Future', where 150 artists from all over the world were asked to create visuals to accompany the album Moon Music. Collaborating with lots of artists was part of the brief from the beginning. 

I wanted to go from simple, understated moments of ordinary life to the existential mystery of it all...

I loved this idea of bringing so many people together- there are many incredible filmmakers who came to mind when I heard the track. Together with our wonderful producer Alex Handschuh we built a dream-collaboration list of filmmakers, visual artists and photographers from all over the world.

Can you say more about your desire to make the film feel expansive?

It was important to me that each collaborator’s section felt personal – rooted somehow in how they see the world, whether abstract or literally. I wanted to go from simple, understated moments of ordinary life to the existential mystery of it all… I think this is what artists do naturally anyway.

How does the film – and the process of making it – celebrate diversity?

It was important to me that everyone’s work felt tonally connected in some way, but also that they were from distinctly different perspectives. We worked with 27 collaborators from all around the world, all from different backgrounds, with different stories and all using different techniques.

I wanted to capture the magic of our natural world, our place in it and how connected we are to everything and one another.

We have nuns on the beach in Brazil, braided rivers in Iceland, a family of cats in Tunisia and gardeners in the Rhondda Valley. I wanted to capture the magic of our natural world, our place in it and how connected we are to everything and one another.

Can you tell us how you developed the briefs for the different directors and artists?

Everyone had a slightly different brief, with the connecting themes being nature and togetherness. I wanted everyone’s sections to feel personal to the artist, hoping that together they’d feel like a strange and unpredictable journey- but one which shares a soul. 

It was a complicated process of curating a list of people whose work all shared enough in common to flow together...

With animation the work is generally more abstract, live-action has more of an immediacy to it, we also have timelapse, photography and documentary footage. Within each technique there are so many variables too, so it was about finding a balance between all of them, how they would flow together.

How did you go about selecting the different contributors?

Our collaborators cover everything from documentary to animation, timelapse and live-action. So many incredible filmmakers came to mind when I heard the track, and it was a complicated process of curating a list of people whose work all shared enough in common to flow together, but also different enough that the video would feel expansive and surprising, with each collaborator taking the film in a new direction. 

We didn’t have a lot of time to make the film – four weeks from start to finish, and with 27 collaborators there was a lot to work out and lots of moving parts. 

It was also really important that this was a global collaboration – we wanted to work with people from all corners of the world. Together with our amazing editor Mdhamiri á Nkemi, we started editing everyone’s existing work into a timeline to get an idea of how all the different styles would work together.