Rejjie Snow is back with a new single, “Cookie Chips”. With a light boom-bap beat and team-ups with Cam O’Bi and the legendary MF Doom, it’s a breezy little ditty from the Irish rapper, one that feels lighter than air.
Its video is similarly weightless. In it, Rejjie heads out into the woods wearing a pair of bunny ears and carrying a huge stack of balloons. The video – directed by Machine Operated, the duo of south London photographers and filmmakers Josh and Nathan – isn’t related to the song in any literal way, but it captures the vibe of it pretty well. “It’s more about how you feel,” Machine Operated explain over email, speaking jointly. “We just wanted to make something that would make people smile. Specifically, our little cousins and grandparents.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever made a song for a video or to match a video, but I try to capture the few words that stick out visually, and from there I begin the visual jigsaw,” adds Rejjie.
The video was initially inspired by Agnès Varda, the pioneering French new wave filmmaker who passed away last year. After her death, Varda’s friends and comrades paid homage by creating a cardboard cut-out of the artist, tying it to balloons, and letting it float off into the clouds. After Rejjie saw a video of this moment, he passed it on to Machine Operated, who are working on a few different visual moments with the rapper planned for this year: “We thought it was beautiful,” they say.
“Agnès Varda kinda guided it for us,” says Rejjie. “Machine Operated sent me back lots of references from there and took the lead in connecting the little ideas I had scribbled down. It all came to life quickly, focusing on simplicity to achieve sentiment.”
The video was very much a case of trial-and-error. “We knew how we wanted to end the video, so we had to build a small narrative to lead up to that,” they say. The shoot on the day was “a vivid blur, riddled with hay fever, pheasants, and fishing wire”. What they learned, say, is that “you can never rely on balloons. Or birds, for that matter.”
The end of the video sees Rejjie – like the Varda cut-out – lifted off the ground, carried away by the elements. What were his memories of the shoot? “Josh had bad allergies, Nathan seemed super zen,” he says, “and I was worried I wasn’t gonna make it home that day.”
Watch the video for “Cookie Chips” below, and a behind-the-scenes video shot by Ben Harris above.