Bat City Marquee: ARE YOUR LESSONS DONE?

Bat City Marquee is a column where the Hyperreal Film Club editors check in on the wide world of new Austin-made videos and films. To submit a video for consideration, drop us a line at hq@hyperrealfilm.club 📼

What vast multitudes do your moments of serenity hold? In Motherbrain’s (Jeremy Wolfe Kivett) new music video for Shaun Ringsmuth’s (of Street Sects) song “Are Your Lessons Done?,” the answer is: ones playful, mythical, infinite.

There is a singular pleasure in snugging up a good pair of headphones around your ears, laying back, and letting synesthesia kick in. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’d agree - it’s even better when the audio-to-visual is bolstered with a little drop of [dealer’s choice]. Motherbrain’s jittery iconography induces that feeling: discrete pops and bleeps and clicks and and twisty effects on the track are accompanied by matching flashes, swirls, drops, and glows that slowly morph into creatures bearing good or ill tidings, depending where your head’s at.

The track and accompanying visuals, as so much of life does, progress from a curious sort of delight to a looming, consuming dread to a sort of awed acceptance of the inscrutable inner and outer workings of it all. The gradual scaling up from nighttime music thoughts lying in bed to gigantic cosmic entities and galaxy-chomping fleets of ships is handled deftly; it’s easy to forget that you’re only in this world for four and a half minutes as you’re shuttled from the micro to the macro (world or doses, again, take your pick).

Jeremy gave us a peek behind the curtain in an email as we were getting ready to publish this review. Some of the concepts and visuals populating this ideas-packed video emerged from “personal experiences with meditation, lucid dreaming and sensory deprivation.” A dream journal, storyboards drawn on paper, digital drawings on a tablet, and finally animation in Premiere Pro round out the tools of creation for this particular origin myth. Keep an eye out for more Motherbrain videos, and check out Jeremy’s Instagram selling *checks notes* DOPE SHIT here!

Check out the video below, and best wishes as you take flight ~