KRS-One video, “Aztechnical”. Behind-the-scenes .. sort of.

The great KRS-One is releasing his 12th album, Just Like That on Jan. 4th 2012 and after months of delay has released a 1st video from the album, “Aztechnical“. The story goes, last year when I was living in Atlanta my friend Corey Ellis got the gig to do the video and what he was given was pretty bare-bones and essentially he had to create the video from scratch.

In typical KRS fashion the song is pretty dense, as it is 6-minutes long and sounds like someone reading a textbook. Not the easiest thing to create or keep interesting to a viewer. The gist of the song is that it is about Cortez taking advantage of the Aztecs and the end of Mayan calendar and possible the end of life as we know it. Pretty light stuff.

He asked if I could create some artwork for the video and I leapt at the chance, since Ive been a fan of KRS-One for a while. I created a bunch of Aztec & Mayan style line drawings to be used in the background and my girlfriend & her sister were employed to be Mayan women. To find the perfect jungle type setting we looked no further than our horrible unkept backyard. Torches were made out of rags covered in vaseline, the girls were painted up, proper lights were setup and Corey filmed. All the KRS-One stuff was green screened.

I said this was “behind-the-scenes” sort of because my inclusion was tiny and the real behind the scenes would be alot of Corey sitting at his computer essentially creating the whole video. In the end, I think it came out looking great.

For more of Corey Ellis’s work, check out his website, T-bolt Films.