How Melchior Leroux composed a dance between the lines

Directed by Melchior Leroux and produced by Marielle Elis through La Belle Façon, this entrancing music video for Hacernos Así by Africa Express (a UK-based non-profit that facilitates collaborations between musicians in African, Middle Eastern, and Western countries) featuring Luisa Almaguer, offers a captivating and original exploration of trans identity through music, choreography and animation.

Intricately blending live-action footage with painstaking post-production, the mesmerising monochrome film unfolds as an intimate, fluid dance between Almaguer and painterly musical notes that appear around her, synchronised with her movements and striking voice.

With 1920s-inspired costumes and an old grainy film aesthetic, the video bridges eras, communicating feelings around trans identity through a unique and timeless visual language of musical bars, bass and treble clefs.

How did the concept for the music video evolve? 

The project really began with listening to Hacernos Así. Marielle Elis, the producer, and I immediately thought the track was exceptional. There wasn't necessarily an intention to make a video at first, but we felt we'd found a visual proposition strong enough to pursue. We presented it to Luisa and her team, who responded very positively, and then began the process of raising the financing to make the film possible. I was given a huge amount of freedom and trust by both the production and Luisa, which is probably what I'm most grateful for.

It was a way of translating something intimate graphically rather than representing it head-on. 

How long did you spend storyboarding and planning before shooting? Did the story change or evolve a much along the way?

The film was designed from the outset to continue evolving after the shoot. The choreography was very modular: with Mès Lesne, the choreographer, we developed certain gestures very precisely while leaving significant room for improvisation. Because I knew the film would be heavily constructed in post-production, I wanted movements I could retime, accelerate, slow down or re-edit in response to very specific elements of the music. In that sense, part of the writing deliberately continued after filming.

Above: Live-action shooting through the camera screen on set. 

Can you tell us more about the characters and the meaning behind the story?

One of the main challenges was finding a different way to approach trans identity. I didn't want a conventional or literal representation, or an obvious opposition between two bodies. I started instead with Luisa's voice, which can move from a very low register to something almost alto-like. I wanted her body to exist through those two registers. In the film, that duality is represented by the bass and treble clefs; originally, they were even intended to merge into a C clef. It was a way of translating something intimate graphically rather than representing it head-on. The bodies themselves became elements of a score - black silhouettes that, from a distance, resemble musical notes.

 I love that the score doesn't rely solely on conventional musical notation: music becomes shapes, lines and masses.

It must have taken a lot of coordination and planning to blend the live action and amination components – what was your creative process like to bring these two elements together?

The edit responds almost constantly to the sound. We tried many versions to synchronise images with the flights in Luisa's voice, the bass and tiny instrumental accents. I also developed a small tool: after separating the track into stems - voice, bass, keyboards and guitar - it generated abstract audio-reactive forms that evolved procedurally according to tempo, intensity and timbre. This allowed us to create graphic material directly from the music itself. Fantasia was an obvious reference for this idea of a graphic response to sound: each sonic element translates into an image, and each image seems to produce a sound.

Above: The crew on set. 

Each scene is so beautiful, it feels like every frame could be a piece of art. Where did you draw inspiration from for the visual style?

A fundamental reference was Cornelius Cardew's Treatise. I love that the score doesn't rely solely on conventional musical notation: music becomes shapes, lines and masses. A rising line immediately suggests a rising sound. There is something universal about that graphic language, which also evokes Miró, the Bauhaus and early twentieth-century painting. 

I genuinely wanted it to communicate something about trans identity and to find a different visual language through which to speak about it. 

Another major reference was Busby Berkeley and those large-scale American film choreographies where dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bodies become graphic patterns. I liked treating the performers almost as animated material, at times approaching pixilation or Norman McLaren. The costumes, partly inspired by the 1920s and figures you might encounter in Renoir paintings, create a bridge between eras. Finally, we  kinescoped the film to recover a 16mm-like grain - something more organic, slightly aged, almost like an old musical score.