Paul hunter on the making of pharrell's freedom video

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Director Paul Hunter On The Making Of Pharrell's "Freedom" Video It ain't "Happy." Over his storied 20-year career, director Paul Hunter has worked with a number of the biggest musicians in the world. He directed Puffy's "All About The Benjamins" and Biggie's "Hypnotize" videos, D'angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," and Marilyn Manson's "Dope Show." But his creative partnership with Pharrell—which dates back to 2003's "Frontin'"—has been among his most creatively fruitful. The power of that partnership is on display in the video for "Freedom," which debuted last week on Apple Music and Vevo. It's a collection of striking, big-picture imagery that ruminates on the different ideas represented by the word "freedom"—from dark-skinned men made to break rocks at gunpoint, to Tiananmen Square and Muhammad Ali, to the restrictive conformity of western beauty ideals, to cheetahs hunting in the wild and whales breaching in the ocean. "Initially, the idea came because Pharrell and I have worked together for a number of years," Hunter says. "He called and asked if I would be interested in working with him on a project that would be connected with him and Apple, for a music video. He told me what the song was, and he had a brief description of some of the things that he wanted to touch on—different things that expressed 'freedom.' It was important to him that it wasn’t about one particular group of people—that freedom was worldwide. And I think especially because we’re both African-American, we didn’t want it to feel like it was just speaking to a time of the '60s where black people were fighting for freedom back then. We wanted it to feel very contemporary, and pay homage to the past and also the present. It was about finding images through various artists, photographers, documentaries, painters, whatever we could find that expressed freedom. That’s the direction that I went in." To accomplish that, Hunter drew from stock footage and imager to supplement the creation of a number of the video's set pieces: the rocks being broken, the sweatshops in India, the church revival, and more.


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