Edmonton alt-pop artist VISSIA shared her final music video, “Doorway” from her With Pleasure album. Diving into classic Western and sci-fi film tropes, the music video pulls visual inspiration from images of vintage cowgirl pinup illustrations, pulp magazine covers, and DIY robot costumes. The super fun and campy video is perfect for fans of sci-fi fan fiction, cosplay, and comic-con.
Synopsis: On the desert planet, Sirocco, a vixen vagabond walks through the door of Lulei Dell’s saloon and a complicated love is rekindled. The woman in black – Bianca Diamond – enlists Lulei’s help in winning a high-stakes game of Cosmic Hold ’em, but when their scheme is discovered, things take a deadly turn. As the lines between right and wrong become blurred, Lulei will discover who she can trust and who she can’t, and ultimately have to decide if love is worth the risk.
Nich Davies, who produced this song (and the album), had suggested early on that the video for “Doorway” should be a space western —
“I think it was the “blaze across the sky” lyric that probably sparked that idea,” Davies explains “I was messaging with Peter Kominek one day (he worked with me on videos for “About Moving On”, “On my Mind” and “My Wom”) and got to talking about this idea, and suddenly we were diving into classic western and sci-fi film tropes and pulling up inspiration images of vintage cowgirl pinup illustrations, pulp magazine covers, and DIY robot costumes.
One day, Peter sent me photos of this incredible cave film set saying, ‘I need to get this thing out of my basement studio, so you need to come down so we can use it and film some scenes for this music video before it gets taken apart.’ So I drove down to Calgary and we created this cute blue alien character and crunched out the cave scenes in 24 hours. That’s really when this video got going.”
The “Doorway” music video was completely green-screened, with everything you see in the video including background and visual effects was created by Kominek. Kominek also created the effects makeup — with VISSIA in hair and makeup multiple times to become Lulei Del (the blue alien), Bianca Diamond (the woman in black), and Ikhozia Salezah (the snake woman). The video took two packed days of filming to get all the shots.
With now over 2 million views on her music videos – VISSIA is gearing up for the global release of her next album Surfacing with the album announcement and first single set for January 2024. Watch for her live-documentary film and album Live, With Pleasure in Fall 2023.