Tower of Babble
Editor - Motion Graphics
This project, created in collaboration with director Brandon Hanks and the Indiana Repertoire Theater, was to create a music video for the first song of their Summer production of Godspell. After speaking at length with Brandon about his vision for the song, I got straight to work.
The Starting Point
The first song of Godspell, “Tower of Babble,” is in large part about how overwhelming and hard to parse all of the different philosophies and political ideologies in society can be. When there are so many voices, all telling you something different, trying to find the truth feels impossible. Everyone is babbling but very little is getting done. The director is this Godspell production wanted to pull from real life events to help the audience connect to the show more deeply. This was during the final days of the COVID-19 pandemic and political tensions were higher than they’ve ever been. We wanted that division, and inability to agree on the underlying facts of the world to be at the center of our interpretation of the song.
The Attention Economy
Another idea we thought would be interesting to explore was society’s shift towards the attention economy. Incendiary language, deceptive clickbait, and misinformation have become a huge part of our lives, stoking division in our country, all in the pursuit of generating the most clicks, selling the most ads. People have done some incredible things with the internet, but when most people can’t even agree on the fundamental facts of reality anymore, there are some serious issues that perhaps we need to start thinking about more seriously. This democratization of content creation has opened the doors for a lot of brilliant creators and artists, but at the same time it’s created a lot of misinformation at the same time.
Where does that lead us?
In the climax of this video, we show a lot of the footage from the January 6th riots. This is the culmination of modern media’s ability to create separate realities for us to live in. It’s the consequence of misinformation, amplified by bad actors, spreading like a wildfire. It’s evidence that the things we say on the internet, the communities we build, the memes we share, all have a powerful effect on the outside world.
And what did we learn from this? Well, after I showed all of the chaos this constant sophistry can generate, I wanted to show how that media machine just kept on spinning. The country collectively took a step back in panic, but it wasn’t even a day before things just kept on heading in that exact same direction and the media machine just kept on spinning.