Canadian songwriter and producer Stephan Moccio (responsible for hits such as Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball, The Weeknd’s Earned It and Celine Dion’s A New Day Has Come) has released a music video named Halston, which poignantly follows the day to day life of a lost property manager.
The video focuses on the lost and found items that may seem mundane to the outside eye, but that hold sentimental value to those missing them.
"With the video for Halston I was interested in exploring the question of, ‘What do the objects we leave behind tell us about ourselves?’” explains the video’s director, Joao Retorta, whose previous work includes music videos for Royal Blood, Prospa, Wolf Alice, Loski and Stormzy.
“Set at an undisclosed lost property office, we see an officer working the night-shift, archiving various types of objects. This setting works as a vehicle for us to look at these items and question their previous lives and owners, and how they came to be lost.
“I wanted them to work as small windows for something bigger. Something that is down to the viewer to fabricate. At its core, the video is about human experience. I wanted to create something that subtly explores life in the city by looking at the objects that its people left behind. Hopefully I achieved it to some degree."
The video was filmed in late November 2021, where Retorta worked with a small production team at a former factory in Chiswick, West London on the banks of the Thames, to create his imagined lost property office, crammed with a range of 'lost' items, such as photos, books, spectacles, passports and toys.
Retorta and his director of photography, Fraser Rigg then created a cinematic atmosphere in this setting using subdued and subtle lighting – complimenting the art direction – working to bring Moccio's music to the fore to act as an emotional soundtrack to the human stories that accompany each object.
The solitary lost property officer, whose task is to record each lost item and photograph them, is played by Linda Edmonds, and the video was edited by Liam Bachler at TenThree and graded by colourist Alex Gregory at No.8.
Sound design was added to the final film, where we hear the voices of the people searching for lost items via messages left on the lost property office's answering machine.