2020

Camila Cabello:
My Oh My

Director Dave Meyers

It’s a commentary on two-faced celebrity culture — a struggle for stars to find a sense of self, and the suffocation of being a role model. The personas give us the chance to play with the strict rigid ideals of femininity.
Dave Meyers

Index

Introduction
Chapter 1: Shooting Mobsters
Chapter 2: Vintage One-Sheets
Chapter 3: Art Deco at Union Station
Chapter 4: The Studio Head's Office

Chapter:

This love letter to the black-and-white world of Hollywood’s golden age is directed by Dave Meyers and stars Camila Cabello as a Hollywood starlet—a good girl who is tired of playing it safe. In a wild Hollywood adventure, she tries being bad for a night, with DaBaby acting as her bad boy side-kick.

The music video was shot over two days at several locations in Los Angeles: the back lot at Universal Studios, the Imperial Western Brewing Co. restaurant at Union Station, and the iconic Byrdview House that was once home to Frank Sinatra.

The compound, which was built in 1949 by architect William Pereira, also included a guesthouse in which Marilyn Monroe once lived.

The video culminates in a splashy final vignette recreating the vibrant palette of 3-strip Technicolor. For this, we turned Universal’s Mexican street into an homage to the “spaghetti westerns” of the 1960s.

lights, camera,
…camila!

Chapter1

Location

Shooting
Mobsters

The video’s opening sequence was imagined to be a class mobster shakedown in a New York alley, culminating in a tracking shot that would reveal that the entire scene was a movie set with Camila Cabello in a starring role.

For this Set Decorator Neil Wyzanowski sourced a large collection of period motion picture cameras, movie lights and filming equipment. Property Master Steve Melton rigged the mobsters’ Thompson submachine guns to fire on cue.

A 1928 Ford Model A sedan parked in the background helped ground the mobster showdown in historical plausibility.

Boxing posters were applied to the alley’s walls using wallpaper paste, and added to the location’s gritty texture.

Chapter2

Specialty Props

Vintage
One-Sheets

The video’s greatest challenge was to design a gallery of vintage movie posters, reminiscent of the period.

The design and production of the movie posters was a team effort. References of actual one-sheets only took us to a point, as no elements could be copied from the posters due to copyright reasons.

Inspiration were found from many iconic movies such as “Some Like it Hot,” “This Gun for Hire,” “Casablanca,” and of course “Breakfast at Tiffanys.”

From the art department team, concept illustrator Landon Lott painted the figures in Photoshop, while graphic designers, Ryan Melton and Jason Perrine, worked simultaneously on the graphic layouts.

To make the effort even more complicated, there was no time for a photo shoot with talent, so the figures were created from scratch.

Chapter3

Specialty Prop

Art Deco at
Union Station

The driveway outside the Western Brewing Company was dressed as a period valet station, with spectacular picture vehicles.

Amongst them a 1958 Jaguar XK150 for Camila and a 1958 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, which would become DaBaby’s vehicle in the video.

From 1939 until 1967, the massive Art Deco-Navajo room was a Harvey House restaurant, part of Fred Harvey’s chain of passenger-rail-adjacent eateries. With its high ceilings, Art Deco fixtures, and Navajo-style tile floor, the restaurant-brewery is breathtaking, resembling a restaurant one would expect to find in the Overlook Hotel from “The Shining.”

[Chorus]
They say he likes a good time
(My, oh my)
He comes alive at midnight
(Every night)
My mama doesn’t trust him
(My, oh my)
He’s only here for one thing (let’s go)
But (so am I)
Camila Cabello