*BEST VIEWED ON MOBILE AND IN VERTICAL*
Lifted from 'Servers', the debut EP by Miro Shot
Pre-save: backl.ink/servers
Buy tickets for our Paris (June 19) or London (June 25) shows: linktr.ee/miroshot
‘Are We Closer’ is a song about the way we communicate with each other, and our idea of what is true and what is real has shifted through technology. It's about the fact that we are more connected than ever and able to share images, experiences, ideas, truth and lies quicker than at any point in human history.
This is not a "Social Media Is Bad" song, this is not about technology being a great evil that is making us less "real" or imprisoning us, it’s a celebration of all the amazing things it can do, a warning about some of the negative things that it brings. It's an attempt to capture the feeling of what being alive in a world with streaming walls of content and images that we are saturated with, and the way it is all thrown together, a cat gif next to rioters, a photo of someone's lunch next to a devastated rainforest.
It seemed fitting that we would make a video for a song about technology, fake news, Brexit, social media and digital/human interaction in vertical/portrait, as it feels like asking people to watch this video on their phones made sense - the same device that news is spread on, that we talk to our loved ones and enjoy images of cats and 100 Greatest Fails Of All Time is the perfect home for our video.
Five members of the collective, representing five different languages were asked to translate the lyrics, but not told the exact meaning behind them, leaving them to make their own assumptions and interpretations, changing the meaning from country to country. Occasionally Google Translate was used, leaving mistakes by an AI in the video itself.
The inspiration for the track comes from Guy Debord's "Société du Spectacle", about the way we are bombarded with versions of reality and everyday life to the point that we lose sight of what is real, or who we are, so that a new form of reality emerges, through Instagram pictures and YouTube personalities. We also stole tons of ideas from Marshall McLuhan, and his amazing points about the content of a message changing based on what medium/platform it’s is consumed on.
To complete this video we called on our amazing network of artists in the Miro Shot Collective:
- Vincent Brak - 3D Concept Artist
- Tomoko Fujiwara - Japanese graphic designer and filmmaker
- Matt Wash - British Photographer and filmmaker
- Charles Awedia - An artist and roboticist in N California who programs industrial robots to create artworks. He commissions work for private collectors or works on projects like ours. He primarily uses Kuka industrial robots from Germany.
- Oliver Harud - An illustrator/artist whose book "Dan and Sam" has just been bought by Stephen Spielberg to be made into a full-length film. Harud has also been documenting the Miro Shot project in a graphic novel with Tomoko Fujiwara, prints available at the merch stand at our shows.
Haz Dullul - Christopher Nolan's VFX supervisor and a feature film director in his own right
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Alex Ford - Graphic designer
Liz Morrison - Motion graphics
Loic Fouquet - Production/Performance
Xavier Cordonnier - Director of Photography
Alex Groover - Cinematographer/Drone Pilot
- Matias Reisch - Production Miro Shot Argentina
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Tomas Etchevers - Cinematographer/Drone Pilot
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-Directed by Matt Wash & Roman Rappak
As usual, we hid Easter eggs in this video, this time we made them a lot harder, as in Boston Dynamic they were found within three hours of the video being up. The three Easter eggs form a question which if answered correctly will get you a free ticket to the upcoming Miro Shot VR show in either London or Paris.