Brian and Leisl Bonell, the couple fronting the group Juana Ghani, are long time collaborators of mine.  When they approached me about doing a music video for their track ‘The Incredible Sadness Of Sonia’, I got on board right away.  

I can’t recall which ideas for this video came from who, to be honest.  It was a collective effort from a large group of friends that had a strong sense of intuition and improvisational skills.  I’d worked with them for years, and we were used to rolling with the moment.  The concept we landed on had us telling a visual story through a long series of photographs.  

The song, largely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ & ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’, also resonated with Jenny, my wife at the time.  She cited it as her favorite book.

Jenny’s talent as a still photographer far exceeded mine.  I had very little experience at all, and didn’t have the confidence to pull this project off without her. My primary role was the editor, and getting live footage for the chorus sections.  The only pics I personally remember taking were at that goddamn lake.  That autumn we travelled, with the band, to a scenic location high up in the Wasatch Mountains.  The leaves were changing with the season, and that body of water was ice cold.  Heather Gardner, the actress in the lead role, had to fully submerge herself below its surface.  I initially had to wade out there until I was waist deep, to get the shots of her descending into the water.  Once she was in, and floating face-up, we rushed as quickly as possible to capture the needed final images.

I felt so bad for her, but she took it like a total champ.  We pulled the near-hypothermic gal out of the water and wrapped her in blankets.  I wished I’d brought another pair of shorts.  It’s all worth a good laugh, now.   

To restore this project, I enhanced the resolution of the 316 photos that comprised Sonia’s voyage and then color corrected them individually.

*

On the Juana Ghani website, Leisl wrote a story behind the making of the song.  I’m including an excerpt from it here: 

One night, back when Brian and I first started writing songs together, I was sitting on the couch with my foot up (I was recovering from surgery on my foot) when Brian came into the room and said he wanted to write a sad song.  “How sad?” I asked.  “Really sad,” he answered, “the saddest.”  He went back into the studio and started writing and arranging the music, leaving me on the couch (with a brain full of post-surgery painkillers) to write the lyrics.

Sonia is another name for Sophia.  Sophia is a goddess of wisdom.  While the song deals overtly with depression and suicide, the sub context is the death of wisdom (the ability to make correct judgments and decisions based on experience) by the accumulation of too much knowledge (information gained through researching a subject, with the intention to use it for a purpose).  In today’s world, it often seems that people are so full of knowledge and facts that they no longer realize or embrace the wisdom of personal experience.  As T.S. Elliott asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”