Mike Mictlan, a member of the Minneapolis hip-hop collective Doomtree, was excited about making a video for one of his tracks off of the "Hand Over Fist" album with Lazerbeak. Naturally, the most personal and most epic song on the album "Prizefighter" was the one we had in mind. The song is a bit of a journey, a litany of personal shortcomings and reactions heed way to a personal mantra to never give up something you love. The song was something very close to Mike, and something we had to get right.
In order to capture the epic feel the track deserved, we decided to go with a two part story mode to accentuate the two separate parts of the track. In the first half, while Mike looks back on his life with an eye towards his regrets, the video is very somber and dark. Instances of his life flash past him in the forms of physical props which have all been made black. It's a sort of purgatory, a reflective space where we can see our past with more clarity. All with a looming reminder of our impending death via a massive hourglass.
Through the main breakdown of the story, things fall apart. This represents the death of the character, and the shedding of his burdens. When the beat comes back in and the final refrain becomes repeated, the entire scene switches to a weightless white composition, now that Mike is finally free of his past and his demons. He makes the transition from pigeon to phoenix to dove.
In launching the video, a simple youtube release would not have really done justice to all the hard work that was put in by so many people, we wanted to do more. So we created a site where you can watch the video in real-time while switching between five different remixes of the song. You can also then download a package containing all remixes, and an optimized version of the video before sharing the site with your friends.
Visit doomtree.net/prizefight
Director: Gregory Hubacek & Victor Rukavina
Motion Graphics: David Schwen & Gregory Hubacek
Producer/Director of Photography: Jake Gardner
Key Grip: Andrew Melby
Concept: Sean Monahan
Type Design: Izaak Berenson-Allan
Wardrobe: Vs. Social Standard
Web Design and Flash Development: Seth Walker