Hello, everyone! 

This is a personal art conquest post! Everyone knows that Coco and I love to make movies together. Our most recent little short dance film is done to the song "Hey Mami" by Sylvan Esso!

When I first heard this song I absolutely loved it. I ended up eventually seing Sylvan Esso perform live in Los Angeles with my best friend, Jennifer. This was an amazing concert that showed me the bands AMAZING talent and also their ability to perform music in a dynamic and engaging way. When I saw the main singer, Amelia Meath dancing onstage, she immediately reminded me of Coco. I visualized making this video right there at the concert. I told Coco about it and a few weeks later we blocked out two days to do the video. One day for costume shopping/discussing ideas and the other one for shooting.

This song is about experiencing cat calling and how vulgar and insane it can be. As a woman we are constantly bombarded with this kind of behavior. It's a terrible, consistent occurence of verbal harassment. I wanted to explore how women feel the need to hide when they shouldn't. Coco has a special skill of dancing wherever, whenever. She doesn't care about who sees her or what they are thinking about her. This is quite refreshing because I've never seen anyone be so fully confident in themselves in this kind of environment while creating art, nonetheless a teenager. I'm sure there's plenty of people who can do this but they just aren't Coco. At least as far as I am concerned. 

Anyways, Coco and I have been making cool stuff together for the better part of our young lives. So at this point she is, as she has always been, my favorite person to do art with. She listens well, understands what needs to be done quickly, and will put full her full self into making sure we accomplish what we set out there to do. She starts ideas, builds onto them and adds her finishing touch to everything. She only starts complaining at the very end and you can hear us arguing on video as I urge her to keep dancing full blast an hour later in public. I'm kind of a dictator.

I made the whole costume and painted Coco in the street. I also poured glitter all over her to assure minimum comfort. At this point she was not exactly comfortable or happy with me but she still killed it. We finished up as soon as we could because the costume was so uncomfortable.

I took a day or two and edited it and posted it and now here we are! Slyvan Esso actually saw the video and said they loved it :)

Hope you like it. It's below. Thanks for reading my rambling post that is probably full of grammar errors. I just never proofread. I'm against it.

Chelsea

Hey Mami from Chelsea Williams on Vimeo.