Spencer Day, an established jazz and contemporary musician, launched his second album Movie of Your Life without a music video. Inspired by the album’s title track, Mercury’s cinematographer at the time, Sean Mitchell, was chosen to create a visual splash on the silver screen. Mitchell led the project as a producer, cinematographer and VFX  supervisor and brought in Mercury president Chris Lawing as director.

Incorporating Day’s love for Hollywood cinema, we connected a series of classic film scenes with Day starring as the leading role. Featuring all-time favorites such as Citizen Kane, Singin’ in the Rain and War of the Worlds, we began with the challenge of how to avoid copyright issues. The solution was a daunting task - recreate famous movie scenes from scratch, through the reconstruction of movie sets, use of CGI, matte paintings and green screen shooting. 

Chris Lawing directed the video from beginning to end- introducing concepts, selecting Hollywood films and storyboards, directing talent, and supervising the production crew (30 people) and VFX artists (over 25 people) to ensure the concept came to life as envisioned. “Movie of Your Life” was selected by Dolby Laboratories as a demonstration video for the global launch of the Dolby 7.1 system at the annual Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention. In addition, it was licensed to Buick for showcasing automobile surround sound systems, premiered in San Francisco’s Dolby Theatre, played in Circuit City/Best Buy stores across the country.