How 27 filmmakers came together to make Coldplay’s epic, sprawling video for 🌈 (Alien Hits/Alien Radio)

In its tactility, detail and expression, Isabel Garrett’s music video for Coldplay’s 🌈 conveys life’s simple joys and, simultaneously, existential wonderment. Splicing imagery of flocks of bird, sunsets, hands holding, sea-swimming, flowers blooming, people running and generally soaking up the best bits of humanity, the film makes us marvel at nature and family in all its forms.

The huge, complex project saw 27 artists from all over the world make sections of film for the track, ranging hugely in style and medium, but the Blinkink director has brought them together in a video that feels flowing, lucid and united in tone and message. Here, she tells us about just how a project of this scale and ambition comes together (in four short weeks); how the artists she chose, and how they were briefed, allowed for personal interpretation yet for their collection to feel part of the same whole.

Everything from stop motion, claymation, painted and hand-drawn animation, to live action, nature documentary and home video footage, is interwoven, to explore the monumental yet utterly grounding subject matter, and visualise the emotive music behind it. As Isabel tells us, much like its original inspirations, the film aims to be expansive yet intimate, spontaneous and unprescribed, yet rooted in reality... and ultimately, full of love and hope.

It’s Nice That: How did this come about, what was the brief from Coldplay, and what was your overall hope for this video, as director?

Isabel Garrett:I was lucky enough to collaborate on Coldplay’s feelslikeimfallinginlove video directed by the brilliant Raman Djafari, and at the end of that project I was invited to put forward some ideas for this track. Coldplay proposed the idea of bringing together artists from all over the world, which is obviously the dream brief! There are so many incredible directors who I’ve always wanted to work with, so curating a dream collaborator list was really magic. It’s a beautiful track. It grows, it’s both expansive and intimate, and ultimately it’s full of love and hope. It made me think of the natural world – everything quietly working away, everything connected. I wanted to centre the video around this and use it to travel around the universe, jumping from simple, understated moments of ordinary life to the endless strangeness of everything.

INT: Why did you work with so many different collaborators, and how did you want this creative approach to influence the final film’s aesthetic?

IG: It was important that the video felt expansive, unprescribed and spontaneous – but also rooted in something real, not entirely random. I tried to choose directors whose work felt tonally connected in some way. There’s a big range of styles in there but they’re all quite delicate and sensitive, and in each one you can really feel the hand of the artist.

INT: How do you set about curating and planning something like this?

IG: First I wrote a loose script to the track with ideas for visual elements, themes and moments. Together with our wonderful producer, Alex Handschuh, we started building a list of filmmakers from all over the world, giving each one a place in the script. We worked with the most incredible editor (and brilliant director – he directed the second sequence in the video) Mdhamiri á Nkemi. We started off creating an edit for the whole video, using existing clips from each person’s previous work – to get more of a sense of the visual flow. This became the working timeline, and every time a collaborator would send an update, we would update the edit. This meant it grew quickly – with storyboards, test footage and eventually the final clips. We’d always be responding to what came in, so the edit was constantly being reworked as things grew. It was a really lovely, fluid process.

INT: Who’s involved, why did you choose these artists and styles, and what does each bring to the film individually?

IG: Some of my favourite filmmakers immediately came to mind when I heard the track, but as we developed the concept, little moments came up which meant we needed to dig deeper and find talent whose work was new to me. It was important that we worked with artists from all corners of the world, and I wanted each collaborator to have the space to really pull the film in a new direction. At the same time, it was important that everyone’s work could sit comfortably next to each other. Our collaborators cover everything from documentary to animation, timelapse and live-action. Animation directors Katy Wang, Jenny Lucia Mascia, Mario Radev, Alice Saey, Studio Gruff, David McShane and Hirotoshi Iwasaki all have beautifully intricate, dreamlike styles.

Daniel Quirke, Lizzy Hobbs, Sam Gainsborough and Ainslie Henderson’s work is tactile, bursting with incredible character and craft. Dong A and Dead Tempo Visions are brilliant digital visual artists. John Davies, Neil Bromhall, Maissa Lihedheb, Joe Clarke, Edin Whitehead and Camila Guerreiro are all incredible documentary filmmakers and photographers, each focusing a completely unique, beautiful and varied lens on the world. Zach Tavel, Will Wightman, Mdhamiri á Nkemi, Ben Reed and Siôn Marshall Waters, Sif Lina Lambæk, Roberto Telles and Tearjerker are phenomenal live-action filmmakers, their work has an immediacy which feels like they’re catching a fleeting, magic moment in time.

INT: What were the overarching themes, topics, aesthetics you wanted to depict?

IG: Each collaborator had a slightly different brief, but the common themes were nature and togetherness. Whether they’re shown in tiny incidental moments or they’re the sole focus. I love the fact that shapes in nature are repeated at all scales – from the cosmos to bacteria, it connects everything – so I wanted to play into this and drift in and out of endless worlds to very intimate close-ups.

INT: What were the major challenges, hiccups, changes, evolutions along the way?

IG: Logistically, we had four weeks to make the video, and 27 collaborators – lots of moving parts! Alex and all the wonderful team at BlinkInk did an incredible job of keeping everything on track. Creatively, it was interesting trying to strike a balance between being over prescriptive and too vague. I didn’t want the video to feel totally random, but also wanted everyone to be able to express themselves in a way which was true to them, otherwise I think it wouldn’t have felt as strange and eclectic.

I actually started by briefing everyone on a different section of the track, thinking we’d keep them in a pre-planned order, but it didn’t end up working that way – we wanted the freedom to keep developing it in the edit. I think it helped though; we only showed each collaborator their section of the track because I didn’t want anyone to be too influenced by the rest of the video, so everyone’s sections really feel unique to the artist.