TAKING A MUSIC VIDEO TO NEW HEIGHTS

MUPPETS MOTIVATED BY METAPHOR

If music already tells a story through melody, harmony, and lyric, then a music video should highlight that story and add to the sensory experience. That was our goal for Ben Rector and his follow up track to the 2022 record The Joy of Music. On the surface, “Wonderful World” tells the story of achieving great accomplishments, but only finding true meaning with “you,” the listener. Like many of the singer-songwriter's lyrics, his use of the royal "you" is not to convey romantic love. Instead, his words are seemingly pulled from a love letter to his daughter, Jane.

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**A Storybook Cover.** This frame accomplishes more than a simple title card. Filmed at the tip of Sourdough Point — a small island on the coast of Lake Pend Oreille in the Idaho panhandle — this opening shot needed to establish a new visual tone from the previous Nashville scene and direct viewers to the mountaintop as Ben’s goal and our video’s final payoff. With custom-painted titles overlaid, viewers immediately have all they need to know about where they are headed.

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We set out to make Ben’s song a story told directly to Jane. In our video, Ben sits on his stairs at home as he begins to tell her all about the important events of his life—which we used as an opportunity to turn the metaphorical life summits into something literal. Staying true to Ben’s often nostalgic-leaning visuals, the story he tells Jane comes to life with a 1980’s style puppet version of Ben. The puppet, playing guitar, looks out across a lake and up a large, distant mountain. He sets off to explore the ‘wonderful world,’ using his little puppet feet to hike the peak. When puppet Ben reaches the summit, he still isn’t content. Only then is he joined by a puppet Jane who falls asleep on his puppet lap. Cut to: live-action Jane asleep on live-action Ben’s lap back on the stairs at home. He picks her up and carries her to bed, now literally and metaphorically climbing higher with her by his side.

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**Parallel Faces.** The transition back from mountaintop to Nashville had to highlight the parallels between worlds. In the mirroring frames, human-Ben takes over singing from puppet-Ben, and a simple a match cut brings the audience back to close the story right where it began.

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PRACTICAL CHALLENGES

Working within two worlds (one metaphorical, one very real) gave us lots of space to create unique, tactile visuals – but not without challenges. We knew that our puppet hero needed to climb a mountain. And while there are ways to fake it, really hiking a real mountain lands more authentically for viewers, and for us as storytellers. If you think about the magic of Sesame Street, a lot hinges on the puppets’ interactions with a human environment. So we needed to choose a real environment that created the same sparks and would lend itself to our metaphor. We chose Lake Pend Oreille in the Idaho panhandle for two reasons: 1) diverse topography for our hero to conquer, and 2) the Idaho landscape is immediately visually distinct from Nashville, Tennessee where our humans begin.

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**Parallel Settings.** To drive home how the real-world and dream-world coordinate, our team designed moments in each that would align in tone and structure. In this example, characters don’t only align in position and costume, but all the way down to the angle and color temperature of the sunset.

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However, no amount of preparation could have readied us (or Puppet Ben) for the Idaho wildfires that spread early in production. The landscape we had chosen became so thick with smoke that the scenic-vistas we sought to capture became… less scenic. All puppets were forced to leave the area, and the humans were forced to push production. But after the smoke cleared, our production and our characters continued the climb.

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puppet in a boat on a lake — **Floating Your Boat.** For “Rainbow Connection” in 1979’s The Muppet Movie, the Henson Company manufactured an air tank submerged below the surface of a manmade bog — allowing Jim Henson himself to puppet Kermit the Frog and his banjo. For our video, Puppet Ben and his canoe needed to travel, and open water had little to hide behind. Shuttershot’s Creative Director Brian Shutters manufactured footholds into a rocky sandbar and swam out with puppet and modified-scale canoe in hand. With Dir. of Photography Stuart Hotwagner shooting with long-lenses and drones from the shore, wave reflections and a dark wetsuit hid the puppeteering, and what resulted was a special moment of practical movie magic.

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HAND PAINTED TEXTURES

While bringing the song’s metaphor to a real environment had challenges, it also opened the door to expand tactile elements from production to post-production. The song title (and post video credits) couldn’t be digitally created if all other elements were hand done…so our team partnered with Typetanic Fonts to design typography (including a large landscape-framing letter “O” hearkening back to the original logo of The Muppet ShOw). We then hand-painted these graphics on glass to be overlaid on our raw footage—capturing the warmth and subconscious magic that each imperfection and brush stroke leaves.

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**_{Title Cards.}**_{To best fit the highly tangible (wonderful) world of Ben Rector’s newest music video — our team hand-painted the custom titles designed in collaboration with Typetanic Fonts on glass.}

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DETAILS THAT CROSS REALITIES

We intentionally added details that connected the video’s real and dream worlds and subtly referenced Ben’s existing work. For example, in the opening moments, Jane runs past a series of kids toys strewn across the floor—all of which are featured in Ben’s lead video from The Joy of Music “Dream On.” In the same way, our puppet world is an extension of how that record’s theme of Joy comes to life as a large, furry, red Henson-created character named Joy. Even blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details like the flowers in vases in Ben’s home appearing in the opening puppet shots enrich the connection between stories.

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**Bringing the Puppets to Life.** To imbue our puppet characters with the spirit of their real-life counterparts, we worked with artist and craftsman Barry Gordemer of Handemonium Puppets. Barry has created look-a-like characters for Jimmy Fallon, Larry King, and many more, and perfectly captured the likeness of both Ben and Jane.

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Musicians are storytellers, and stories can remind us to appreciate even the hardest of journeys. Thanks to artists like Ben, we get to uplift work that showcases how wonderful the world really is.

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Songwriter and Director. Singer-songwriter Ben Rector sits down with "Wonderful World" music video director Brian Shutters to discuss the making of the video.