Doja Cat - Vegas
The film for Doja Cat’s “Vegas” follows a sensual, energetic, and climactic narrative rich with southern culture and style.
Set in the soaking heat of the Deep South we find a raw, indelibly Afrocentric scene. A world of sensuality and exploration. Within this world, there exists a building, with a church on the ground floor, and a heaving club upstairs. Gorgeous Black people, parishioners, and partiers, separated by a single-story move to the song with rebounding energy and movement.
Doja Cat leads the top-floor club scene. A chicly boisterous dance party featuring a dazzling coterie of partygoers. We will be stylistically salient, recalling cultural aesthetics that withstand the test of time.
There's a power to her that evokes the superstardom of the 60s, frenzied ecstatic energy that takes full possession over the crowd's mind, body, and soul.
The Church downstairs, a humid but soulful space, piously appointed, is led by a charismatic YOUNG PASTOR. Whose powerful sermons shake the Lord’s house down to their very foundations.
Vegas is a music film whose cultural roots belong to the spiritual seeds of the south. This is a story about their dignity, their perseverance, as well as our own. A fully realized world of community, energy, and excitement.
Concept
We paint our world with the timeless vibrancy of spiritual Afrocentrism. Black men and women of the 60s, living out their lives. It’s a world that breathes in the warm saturated air of the south and breathes out color, light, love, sensuality, and music.
The way the light streams through the slowly waving branches of ancient Willows and Angel Oaks. The spontaneous laughter, which sings out strong and loud across a cool night. Smells of sumptuous meals made and shared with love. Sensuality of spirit. Warmly familiar, it transports us to space and time pictured only in faded photographs and hazy memories.
Inside an urban building, we find Big Momma Thornton sitting at an empty bar, finishing a glass of Tennessee liquor. The club is empty, save for one other woman, Doja Cat. Doja is at a side stage, prepping for her performance. She puts on the final finishing touches and then goes out to meet Thornton. Equal parts inspired and reverential, Doja and Thornton share a moment. Icons connected over the ages. Doja then takes the stage and begins her performance.
She’s the image of irrepressible radiance within a crowded kinetic club where freedom of spirit succeeds over all else. As she performs men and women move around her with zealous energy.
As this club energy feeds downstairs to an ongoing church service, we see the members of the congregation match and then exceed it. The young pastor extolls with unbridled passion. His fiery sermon is explosively received by a flock of devout worshippers who fall to their knees in adulation.
We cut away to vignettes of the world around us. Conceptually rich photograph-inspired scenes that show the unrehearsed beauty of Black life and southern culture.
Doja continues her performance inside the club. Her presence is captivating, in a league all her own, her moves novel and unique. Possessed only by the muses of music and movement.
As the song closes out, we see Doja Cat dancing in the moonlight inside a nearly empty club. Cool night air breathes in through the open windows. The bar sparsely attended by our guest cast and a skeletal staff.
