Want It Back Music Video: How I Directed a World Where Only Kids Rule

In 2014 I directed the “Want It Back” music video for the French rapper Guts, featuring Patrice Bart-Williams. The idea was simple to say and hard to shoot: a world with no adults, where children run the office, the police, the factory and the candy trade. It went on to win Best Music Video in Barcelona and San Francisco and was shared by BuzzFeed and MTV. Here is the full story, from the first phone call to the storyboards, the props and the awards.

How the job found me

A few years earlier I had shot a music video for the French rapper Grems. He was impressed by how professional the shoot was, because we had built several different sets for the clip. When Guts asked him if he knew a director to recommend, Grems gave him my name. Guts called me, and that was it.

The pitch

Guts is a French artist based on Ibiza. His label contacted production houses and directors around the world to pitch ideas for the new video. Based on the track and the lyrics, we proposed an idea with high virality potential: a music video performed by 5-year-old kids.

The plan was to build several mini stories with young kid actors in the key roles, with a crew split between Paris and Shanghai. With our second studio in Brussels, The Frenchfries, we made it happen on a very short timeline. The label and the artist loved it and followed us.

The track and the concept

The song was recorded with the New York City Children’s Choir, and the track already says it all: children who want the world back for themselves. I did not have to invent a message. A lot of my personal work lives in the universe of childhood, so this was a gift.

I decided to build a world where there are only children. No adults anywhere. The boss of a giant corporation is a kid. The police are kids. The drug dealer deals candy. Every time I found a new role to flip, the idea got stronger. We shot it in Shanghai and Paris, and it was one of my first productions in China, maybe the first.

The Want It Back music video story, from treatment to screen

The treatment opens on a child’s drawing of the song title. A little blonde girl lies in a schoolyard and draws a house squeezed between skyscrapers. The camera glides in slow motion through kids playing jump rope, marbles and clapping games, until the whole school appears, literally crushed between two towers, just like her drawing.

Then we zoom into the Shanghai skyline and enter a finance office at the top of a tower. A boy in a suit and glasses, buried in paper, is at the end of his life. The papers turn out to be multiplication tables. Down in the street, in a traffic jam in a city of 28 million people, a tiny traffic cop sweats at his red and white podium, filmed in fisheye to make his helplessness absurd. Two older kids deal brightly colored candy nearby, and you understand the allusion.

A fight over a toy in the schoolyard drops a teddy bear. The camera falls into its sad eyes and pulls back to reveal a toy sweatshop, where children assemble identical bears under an inspector with a giant magnifying glass. I mixed those kids on purpose: black, Asian, European. No single country is pointed at, it is about worldwide working conditions.

The revolution starts small. A kid picks up the bear and gives it to a little girl. The office boy flips his desk. The child cop raids the workshop with a huge water gun, the factory turns into a pillow fight, and the schoolyard ends up empty, notebooks and jump ropes on the ground. The last shot zooms out of the drawing and we find Patrice finishing it, in a style that stayed childish because it kept the soul of a child.

Storyboards, props and designs

This project was far from a simple shoot. I did a lot of the design myself: animation, 3D and a lot of matte painting to build that squeezed Shanghai world. We built our own props, and the title of the film is hand drawn, in the spirit of that opening child’s drawing. Everything was meant to look handmade, so the kids feel like they built the world themselves.

I drew the storyboards by hand first, then cleaned them up into proper boards with the production template, sequence by sequence. The props came from the same universe. The kid boss works for a company called Happy Bear Corp, with a bear mascot and an “Employee of the Month” frame, and I designed the posters and charts that fill his office.

The look: references and moodboard

The tone was realistic and poetic with a touch of humor, never caricature, with effects that stay invisible and serve the story. My references were all music: Notorious B.I.G. for the realistic side and the playback, Danny Brown for the punchy modern side, Stromae for the rhythm and the mixed cast, and Skrillex for the slightly shifted spirit and overall look. The moodboard was chalk on concrete, kids’ scribbles and crayon drawings, school uniforms, tiny cops and gangsters, and the grim reality of toy factories.

I also leaned on a commercial I had directed for a Chinese kids channel, the HaHa TV spot, where we picked the cast out of more than 300 candidates. It proved to me that kids and Shanghai architecture work well together.

Location scouting

We scouted Shanghai for a school squeezed between towers, a derelict workshop for the toy factory, and an office for the finance kid. The old brick school and the empty workshop became the backbone of the film.

Casting on a small budget

In the treatment the cast was 8 to 14 years old, with a few key kids singing parts of the song in playback. On set I went younger. We did not have a crazy budget, and kids are priced by age: the youngest are the hardest to control, so they cost less. That was the bargain I made with the casting director, who turned out to be the mother of Raina, who years later starred in my short film Kite. Her son was also one of the kids in the video.

Chaos, used on purpose

The shoot was super organized and still a little chaotic, because the actors were so young. Kids fight, and during the shoot they really did. Instead of fighting it, I used it. When they fought for real, I put it in the film and wrote it into the storyline, which is why it looks so real on screen.

Results and awards

The sharing plan had three steps: the label’s channel and the artist’s followers, our own networks, and a professional PR agency in Paris hired by the label. The numbers:

• 300,000 YouTube views in under a month, double the label’s previous video
• About 400,000 YouTube views later, 19,543 Facebook shares, and 3,034 likes against 32 dislikes (99% positive)
• Featured on TV networks including MTV, M6 and W9
• Covered by BuzzFeed, Videostatic, Adweek Talent Gallery, Promonews, IMVDb, Nova Planet, Bootslap, Afropunk and Beater, among others

BuzzFeed ran it on 27 November 2014 under the title “INCREDIBLE! watch this Music Video performed by 5 years old kids!” The festival run:

• Best Music Video, FILMETS Badalona Film Festival (Barcelona), 2015
• Best Music Video, Silicon Valley Film Festival (San Francisco), 2015
• People’s Choice Award, Wing’n it Bigui Mini Film Festival (Beijing), 2016
• Official Competition, International Music Video Festival (Paris), 2015
• Official Selection, SVFF Harlem, 2016, and FIFF Belgium, 2015

The Barcelona award that almost got lost

Filmets told me I was selected. I wrote back that I would love to come, because I love Barcelona. I used to do street painting there in the 2000s, when it was a big street art city. No reply. I asked my stepfather to write to them in Spanish. Still nothing. Then, two days before the festival, they wrote: “Hey man, are you there? Because you won.” I was in China. A friend in Barcelona offered to collect the award for me, and suddenly they said no need anymore. I still do not fully understand what happened. The award itself is beautiful: the Badalona symbol, from an area of Barcelona I painted in.

You never know where a project leads

Grems led to Guts. Guts led to this video. This video led me to the casting director, whose daughter Raina I later worked with on Kite, which went on to win awards of its own. One project hands you to the next one.

Credits

Artist: GUTS feat. Patrice Bart-Williams. Label: Heavenly Sweetness. Director and writer: Olivier Hero Dressen. Production: Studio Supreme. Co-production: thefrenchfries.com. Production executive: Zhong TV Entertainment. Executive producer: Stanley Yang. Producers: Olivier Hero Dressen and Luca Buzas. Assistant director: Richard Chung. Director of photography: Kevin Wen. Second unit: Philippe Carron (director) and Marco Vieira (DOP). Casting director: Ariel Sheng. Stylist: Luca Buzas. First assistant and editor: Vincent Bao. Color grading, 3D and FX: designhero.tv.

More from the blog and my work

If you like the craft side of this project, read why AI footage does not look like cinema, my guide to character sheets for designing characters, and the story of an award-winning short film on envy and jealousy in the digital age. I also talked about cinema and AI in an interview about cinema with Claude.

See more of my directing on herodirector.tv, or hire the team behind this video at Studio Supreme, my production company for commercials, music videos and films.

Frequently asked questions

Who directed the Want It Back music video?

Olivier Hero Dressen directed and wrote the “Want It Back” music video in 2014 for the French rapper Guts, featuring Patrice Bart-Williams.

What is the Want It Back music video about?

It is set in a world with no adults. Children run the office, the police, the toy factory and the candy trade, and little by little they revolt against the system. The video ends with Patrice finishing the child’s drawing that opens the film.

Where was Want It Back shot?

It was shot in Shanghai and Paris, with a crew split between the two cities and a second studio in Brussels, The Frenchfries.

What awards did Want It Back win?

It won Best Music Video at the FILMETS Badalona Film Festival in Barcelona (2015) and at the Silicon Valley Film Festival in San Francisco (2015), plus the People’s Choice Award at the Wing’n it Bigui Mini Film Festival in Beijing (2016). It was also in Official Competition at the International Music Video Festival in Paris.

Who sings on the Want It Back track?

The track is by Guts featuring Patrice Bart-Williams, and the song was recorded with the New York City Children’s Choir.

How many views did the Want It Back music video get?

It passed 300,000 YouTube views in under a month, double the label’s previous video, and later reached about 400,000 views with 19,543 Facebook shares and a 99% positive like ratio.