When Katy met Joel

The Sweet Shop’s Joel Kefali has done his fair share of ads (often along with his past Special Problems cohort Campbell Hooper), but he’s gaining a reputation for his music videos, having got behind the camera for Lorde, Tame Impala, The Presets and The Naked and Famous. Now he’s done the same for Katy Perry, creating a colourful pop art-inspired clip that Rolling Stone called ‘a hyper-stylized, pastel-soaked pleasure dome‘.

As he told Stuff: 

“I was trying to fully interpret the pop nature of Katy Perry, because I hadn’t done any straight down the line pop videos before. My idea was to make a pop video but to keep some edge to it, and make it feel like it was pop art,” he says. “We did a studio-based shoot where we used lots of animation and props, and then each line of the song had it’s own little vignette. I wanted to do something that was close to the work I’d already done. I like mixed media, jumping between live action and animation, and I focus more on design.”

Kefali left The Sweet Shop a while back and Special Problems is no more.