Ride Or Die by Alexander James Rodriguez
"The night we filmed the video, the song had just released. It was a last minute 'Hey let's make a cool visual.' Santee Alley in the Fashion District of Los Angeles was locking up, street sweepers were washing down the road and scooping up the bags of rubbish. The four of us (my mom, Brian on camera, Jordan on sax and I) rocked up with one battery powered light and one camera. There were mannequins still being pulled inside from that days trading, people were hugging and headed home. We stood on the corner and my mom pressed play on the portable speaker for the song. Her vision was super clear. A sax player practicing on the empty alley and a lonesome character kicking around the street waiting to tell his story, to anyone that would listen, of his girl who was fearlessly independent but always his ride or die. For the music video edit I was inspired by the use of cinematic split screen transitions, a technique which signals a certain stylization so as to divide the audiences attention between my character and that of the saxophone player. We were teaching ourselves how to do it as we were editing. I also taught myself how to mix the natural street sounds of Downtown LA during filming and Jordan's live tenor saxophone with that of the alto saxophone used at the beginning of the song itself. Blending the two saxophones to make the video music was so incredibly hard!" - Alexander James Rodriguez
Stream the Song Here!
Watch the video Here!