SMUGGLER's Allie Avital Directs Kai Music Video "Fade Away"

This music video “Fade Away” is the second project pairing artist Kai and director Allie Avital who’s with production house SMUGGLER. In this clip, Kai opens the curtains and performs through the window, while otherworldly fish fall from the sky outside. What begins as a single fish pressed against her window, turns into a school of fish raining down from the sky, until eventually Kai turns to a fish herself. In connecting with the rebirth happening around her, she becomes part of nature, transforming and healing as the world does too.

Shot by Sonia Tsypin, a frequent collaborator of Avital (and the director’s sister), they developed playful and experimental visual language. The camera movement adds energy to the performance and the mixture of close-ups of abstracted images, coupled with the surreal visual effects creates a feeling that’s magical yet minimalist. She cleverly juxtaposes sensual micro imagery with macro shots giving character and emotion to the natural elements.   

The idea was born out of production constraints given the times and inspired by the events in the world.  Avital sees all of us living in a fish tank while the planet is healing without us in it.  The video is about the planet, climate changes, fluidity in all its forms, Piscean Nature, and Avital creates her own unique fiction utilizing all of these elements. There’s an otherworldly quality to the music video as she tells a strange but tasteful story of endings, evolution, rebirth and healing.

"This video was inspired,” said Avital, “by all the stories of animals emerging during the pandemic--dolphins in canals and goats in the streets etc...nature healing itself as humanity lays low. Directed remotely from New York and shot in L.A. by my sister Sonja, it was such a luxury to do a second video with an open minded artist such as Kai. And then working with the brilliant animator Erik Ferguson again to design the creatures made for a beautiful collaboration across many time zones in the heart of quarantine."