More than 280 music videos later: the rules I use to think up a video

Do the maths and something odd turns up. I have 273 singles and more than 280 music videos. There are more videos than songs. Which means some songs have more than one video, and that at some point I decided a single visual version wasn't enough. That's not the norm. Normally a song gets its video and that's that, if it's lucky.

I direct every one of those videos myself. I'm not going to walk you through how they're made, step by step, because that keeps changing and, besides, I don't think it's the interesting part. What I can share are the rules. The questions I ask myself before I start and the ones I ask when something isn't working. There aren't many, and they've been with me for a long time.

The video doesn't have to explain the song

This is the first rule and the hardest one for me to keep. When you've got a lyric with a story in it, the temptation is to tell it in pictures, shot by shot. The video then becomes a translation of the lyric, and a literal translation is almost always one too many. The listener is already hearing the story. If they also watch it told exactly the same way, they get bored or, worse, feel you're treating them as if they hadn't understood.

I'm more interested in the video adding something. A tone, a contrast, a detail the lyric doesn't say. Sometimes I manage it. Other times I realise halfway through that I'm just illustrating, and I stop.

Now every song has its own page on my website, with the video and the full lyrics side by side. That's freed me up a little. Anyone who wants the words has them right there, complete, to read. The video can afford to wander off somewhere else.

Tone is the first thing I decide

My songs mix humour and hurt, with plenty of camp and a dash of copla, the old Spanish torch song. A title like «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour) asks for one thing, and a song about an ex who still stings asks for another, even if both have jokes in them. Before I think of a single image, I ask what temperature the song is running at. Whether it's for laughing, for laughing a bit and then going quiet, or for going quiet altogether.

Get that wrong and nothing else can rescue it. I've watched videos of mine that had beautiful images and still felt off, and nearly always this was why: the video was heading one way and the song the other. Like two people in the same room not speaking.

A lot of people found me on TikTok, through «Tan Cateto», and that taught me how much the opening of a video weighs. It's not that you always have to start with a bang; that gets tiring. But the first few seconds do have to make clear what the thing is about, even if only through the atmosphere. Someone flicking through videos with their thumb decides very fast.

At the same time, I don't want the whole video to be nothing but that opening. A full music video has to hold up to the end, and that asks for something else: that something shifts, that there's a small movement from start to finish. I carry both demands and I don't always know how to reconcile them. Shorts, which I make by the hundred, solve part of the problem, because there I can keep the punch and forget the rest.

When I make more than one video

Having more videos than songs wasn't a plan. It just happened. There are songs that, once the first video was done, left me feeling there was another possible reading. Another way of seeing it. Not better, not worse. Different.

Sometimes I wonder whether this is generosity or indecision. Probably a bit of both. Making a second video is a way of not choosing, and choosing is exactly the part of the craft that shows the most. I've got it written down as an open question.

With more than 280 videos, the risk is the same as with any long series: that everything looks too alike, or that nothing looks like anything. I want someone who watches three of my videos in a row to feel they come from the same place, the same universe. That universe has a name, PLANETA GAYFOLK, and the idea of a planet helps: a place with its own rules, its own weather, its own people.

But that planet has room for very different neighbourhoods. «La primera drag» (The first drag queen) and «Mi novio de Albacete» (My boyfriend from Albacete) don't need to live on the same street. What they have to share is a gaze, a way of treating their characters with affection even while I'm laughing at them.

What I throw out

Directing is mostly throwing things out. It's a habit across all my work: I decide, I discard and I choose, including when I produce the music with artificial intelligence tools. With videos it's the same. Most of what I come up with never makes it to the end. And that's fine. A video with all my ideas in it would be a disaster.

My rule for cutting is pretty simple. If I like an image but can't say why it belongs in this song and not another, it's out. If something's funny but smothers the serious moment in the lyric, it's out. If I'm hesitating a lot, the answer is usually no.

Whatever survives that filter, hits and misses included, is what you see. Sometimes very little survives, and the video ends up simple, almost bare. I've learnt not to panic about that. A simple video that fits the song beats a crowded one that buries it.

The music videos, each on its song's page, are at mikesaintlouis.com.