http://www.vimeo.com/1968020Rio En Medio- The Umbrella

I ran into Eli Stonberg a couple of weeks back at the Little Joy. He mentioned that he directed this beautiful video for Rio En Medio, who has released records on Devendra Banhart and Andy Cabic’s label Gnomonsong and the Los Angeles based Manimal Vinyl. Turns out Eli is quite the up and coming filmmaker, with music videos for the Passion Pit and Daedelus coming out soon. Check out my chat with Eli about the inspiration behind “The Umbrella” after the jump.

“In terms of inspiration for the video it pretty much started from the line in the song “black butterfly” and grew from there. Originally it was going to be a black butterfly, but Danielle and I agreed that getting a little more otherworldly would be a cool thing to do. I wanted the story to be a simple connection between an alien creature and Danielle, sort of like the animated film The Iron Giant. For the perspective of the video, I was influenced by the intro to Lord of War, which you can check out here:

If you’d like to check out more about how we made the video, here’s a behind the scenes video:

Thanks for watching! “