Headie One
Martin's Sofa

4th Floor had the absolute pleasure of working with Team Relentless on drill king Headie One’s latest campaign. Its been not only a labour of love, but a true cross-departmental affair, with the 4th Floor forces truly united to bring Headie One’s ‘Martin’s Sofa’ to life. 

Headie One’s ‘Martin’s Sofa’ speaks of the darker periods of Headie’s life, where he struggled juggling his education, music career and other illicit means of income…. With ‘Martin’ occupying the Bando where Headie worked and often lived.

Working with Relentless, we managed to shoot the actual sofa from Martin’s house – complete with years of grime that no art department could recreate. It was a true in-house affair, with Creative Direction from Frank Fieber, DOP by Frank and Reuben Bastienne-Lewis, design by Alex Bois, lighting from Joe Magowan and Muhammed Bryan, and hand-typed by Hattie Norbury.

Continuing with camera in one hand, and a bottle of anti-bac in the other, the Visual Creative team got stuck in to creating some amazing visuals for the lyric video. They animated and projected the lyrics of the track onto the very same sofa, and filmed it from a variety of dynamic angles to fully showcase its horror. With added dramatic lighting, dry ice and smoke, they were able to create an aesthetic as dark and intense as the story.

Creative Direction and photography from Frank Fieber, design from Alex Bois & Hattie Norbury, videography Reuben Bastienne, animation and edit Charlie Clinton & Luca Brewster, and lighting and special FX Joe Magowan & Muhammed Bryan.

Alongside our visual creative work on the campaign, Relentless asked the 4FC CRM & Owned Platforms team to create something online which would excite users to pre-save the artist’s next single. Driving traffic through the website is an ideal way to improve his SEO, so the team suggested featuring something that could encourage repeat visits, which saw the Design and Video Production team stage, film, and produce a series of videos of the sofa filling in with colour from 0-100% in 6 steps as the pre-saves increased. The uplift in interest for the website led to it being the #2 UK website, and secured thousands of CRM pre-saves, with the results of the collaboration available to see at Headie One’s website and Instagram. 

And to round off an incredible 4th Floor effort on this campaign, the official video was commissioned but our very own visual genius Mike O’Keefe! The video continues with the ongoing theme, and acts as a stylised telling of Headie’s journey from a North London estate to music star – shot on location at Broadwater Farm and Twickenham Studios.

Director – Nathan James Tettey

Executive Producer – Ore Okonedo

Producer – Alex Ayodele-Otele

Relentless – Ben Coates and Sabrina Kristiansen