Fragile
Directed by Nathan Haugaard — Music Video for Huddy
Four Videos, One Visual Thread
I directed and photographed four music videos for Huddy, designed to be watched in sequence when all four are released. Vendetta is the first act — bold, boisterous, aggressive. Fragile is the second — a quiet reprieve, atmospheric and emotionally exposed. The visual language shifts between the two, but a unified thread runs through all four: rich colors, heavy texture, hard contrast.
Every video in the series was shot on the same cameras and lenses: Canon C400, Canon R5C, and Red Monstro, all with Canon Sumire primes and a classic soft diffusion filter. Shooting spherical but cropping to 2.35:1 gave me the widescreen cinematic frame without the optical distortion of anamorphic. The Sumire primes have a warmth and softness that pairs beautifully with the diffusion — skin tones glow, highlights bloom, and the image has a tactile, almost filmic quality.
The Quiet Second Act
Where Vendetta burns hot — baroque, candlelit, amber-drenched — Fragile cools down. The palette softens. The camera slows. The compositions open up and breathe. If Vendetta is about the armor we put on, Fragile is about what happens when it comes off. I designed two distinct visual worlds for this video: a Rococo painting and a cloud.
The Rococo Painting
For the first look, I was inspired by Benoît Delhomme's fashion photography — the way he builds painterly images with layered soft light that feels like it's coming from everywhere and nowhere. I built a giant soft single-source key and added various layers of soft and hard light around it, then wrapped the whole setup with bounces to create a luminous, enveloping quality. The result feels less like a lit set and more like a painting — the kind of warm, diffused glow you see in Rococo portraiture, where the light seems to emanate from the subject themselves.
The Cloud
The second look was pure chaos by design. I filled the entire stage with smoke, set up two SFX fans to keep it moving, and lit everything with a single 5K Fresnel. Huddy stood on a rotating lazy susan, spinning in the haze. I shot a variety of frame rates and shutter angles to create the chaotic, disorienting mess that appears in the final edit. Some frames are sharp, some are smeared, some are ghostly — it's the visual equivalent of losing control.
Maintaining consistency across a four-video series while giving each installment its own identity is a particular challenge. The diffusion filter and the Sumire primes are the connective tissue — they give every frame a consistent texture regardless of the lighting conditions or color palette. The audience may not consciously notice, but they feel it. It's the same world, even when the mood shifts.