What is the film about?

Star People strolling through the night.

Each of them alone, in their own dance, accompanied by shiny flowing waves. Those small sparkling dashes can lead them out of the darkness into surrealistic, mysterious and cheerful scenery, if everything goes right…

Director Irina Rubina (Jazz Orgie, Black Snot & Golden Squares) creates a half abstract night walk fantasy to till now unpublished piece by Miles Davis from the years 1982-1985 – his interpretation of Tina Turner’s WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT. The unique selling point of this animated video is that the visual world is based on original drawings by Miles Davis himself.

Comissioned by Sony Music Entertainment.

• Directed and produced by Irina Rubina
• Design: Irina Rubina
• inspired by original drawings by Miles Davis
• Animation: Michelle Brand, Lewis Heriz, Veronica Solomon, Anita Gill, Luca Tóth, Irina Rubina
• Clean-up, Coloring & In-betweens: Iris Maier
• Script & Editing: Irina Rubina
• Compositing: Toby Auberg, Irina Rubina
• Animation Production Company: iraru.films
• Senior Producer, Sony Music Entertainment: Derek Watson,
• Senior Creative Director, Sony Music Entertainment: Noah Shulman

A little background information...

My strong connection to jazz as a visual artist has started in 2015 with an abstract short film called JAZZ ORGIE. From that moment on, music took a very special role in my work. This film brought me to a live-animation-perfomance with the band TRI to the legendary KIND OF BLUE album by Miles Davis. So six years later, to embrace his music again and to create an animated music video to WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT was a perfect continuation for my personal Jazz – trilogy.

This project was a 100% match: The amazing music piece as well as the stunning drawings by Miles Davis have enchanted me straight away. It was such an honor and a pleasure to dive into Davis’ artwork and to develop an abstract story based on it. And I am so happy and grateful that I could put an amazingly strong and talented team together with whom we were able to give this story a colorful new life.

How was the film made?

It was quite a challenge to find an adequate and respectful translation of Davis’ drawing style, full of small beautiful details, into the language of animation. Our goal was to faithfully represent the complexity in the visual approach of Miles Davis on the one hand, and animate efficiently within the constraints of a short-term production framework on the other. Working with an elaborate system of loops was our way of navigating through this challenge; a rhythmic system that also perfectly interacts with this incredible piece of music.

Credits for this scene: This stunning walk cycle was animated by Lewis Heriz, cleaned and colored by Iris Maier. The hypnotizing waves are coming from Anita Gill, in-betweened by Iris as well. Dancing plants by Luca Tóth, all glued together and covered with magic powder of compositing by Toby Auberg.