Portfolio highlight: Edem Wornoo, writer and director

Edem Wornoo graduated as part of the first cohort of D&AD Shift London. The Ghanaian-British writer and director from South London has gone on to win accolades for his craft, including Best Screenplay at SoulFest 2022 for his short film Butterfly Affect, produced in association with Sky. He has also directed music videos and commercials for artists such as Dave, Stormzy, and Danny Brown and for brands including D&AD, ASUS and adidas. See some highlights from his portfolio below, with behind-the-scenes insight from Edem.

Dave - The Boy Who Played the Harp

For this video, we used a series of match cuts to place Dave at the epicentre of numerous significant moments in human history as he questioned what he might have done had he actually been there. It's hard to overstate how important this song and video are, considering the state of the world today. We used a giant robot arm — called a motion control rig — to create the feeling of seamless motion between all of the worlds explored in the video. It was really important to me to capture the majority of this video in-camera, so we used only a few very specific moments of CGI (crafted by HUMAN BEINGS) to build upon our physical set builds. This is pretty impressive, in my books, considering that we jump through space and time from an air raid to the Titanic to a London tube and beyond.

Danny Brown - Y.B.P. (feat. Bruiser Wolf)

I co-directed this video with my boy Will Child. He's an amazing claymation artist, among other things, and whenever we collaborate, we try to combine the worlds of live-action filmmaking and stop-motion animation in some way. This was our best attempt to date, which, in all honesty, I wasn't sure was going to work until we got our first shots back. This was a crazy full-circle moment for me, because Danny Brown was such a seminal figure for me and my friends when we first started getting into rap music in school. It meant a lot to me to be able to contribute to his rollout.

Hutch - Coasting

In January, I had the honour of working with an amazing artist and human called Hutch. He poured his heart out on this song, and I think we made a video that encapsulates that feeling. I tend to believe that each song has a perfect video somewhere out there in a nebulous artistic idea space — sometimes you reach it, and sometimes you don't. Thankfully, for Coasting, I think we hit the nail on the head!

Duval Timothy performs 'First Rain' live in Sierra Leone

This is perhaps my most meditative piece. My DOP Stephen Dunn and I shot this out in Freetown, and we literally just went where the city took us, visually and sonically. Many of the sounds you hear in the video are organic sounds we recorded as we shot. When I showed my parents this video, they said it's a good one to fall asleep to… I'm going to take that as a compliment, because it is… Right?… Right…?

You can reach out to Edem Wornoo via his website.