Wayo – Brick house sessions

Brickhouse sessions are a series of music videos featuring the Wayo band, created for streaming purposes on YouTube and other online channels. I was part of Wayo from 2015 to 2019 as the creative director. I worked on the brick house sessions videos with a crew of five, of which four were amateurs involved in music video production for the first time. Wayo band embarked on the project with the intention of breaking away from their stage performance to create more liberating and creative music. In addition, we wished to raise the bar and improve the quality of YouTube videos produced at the time in Sri Lanka. We produced the series following extensive research into alternative music videos available for streaming online. We settled on a structure that was unique to Wayo, yet flexible enough to allow us to create 12 different videos, each with its own exclusive appeal.

I crafted the concept, art direction, costume, lighting, filming, costume, and editing of each video around the song and its genre. Hence, I was able to enjoy a series of exhilaratingly different experiences during production. I was in charge of all aspects of producing brick house sessions from concept development to all aspects of production. I was the Creative Director, Art Director, Costume Designer, Production Designer, Director Of Photography, Editor, Colorist, and Graphic Designer for the project. The brick house sessions project challenged me to source skills and experience that I had gathered from working in many fields and handling all aspects of film and video production. It was an exhilarating experience, even more so, as we produced these videos amidst the restrictions of an extremely thin budget.

We first came up with the concept for Brick house sessions in 2017. However, we were not able to find a sponsor. Hence, Wayo took the decision to bear the entire production cost, while I and my fellow production crew offered our services free of charge. Brick house sessions soon became a trending topic amongst Sri Lankan music lovers, and we did end up creating a new wave of music video production in the country. Later, even local TV.