“INNER WORLDS AND OUTER SPACE: THE MAKING OF DIASPORA X”
General relativity doesn’t care for time’s arrow. Its equations are time-symmetric; the math works perfectly fine running forwards or backwards, inside and out. And so, when the theory predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to create an all-consuming black hole, we might be inclined to explore this phenomena’s flipside: a theoretical white hole, from which matter and light will spontaneously explode.
In 2022, white holes were on Dreamer Isioma’s mind. The Chicago-based musician was coming down from the release of his first album, Goodnight Dreamer, which had sparked his meteoric rise to recognition among the uber-cool. He was coming into his own as well: “I had just gotten top surgery, and I was living my life as Dreamer, as this new version of myself,” he said. “I was dictating how I wanted to be perceived, but I didn’t want to be perceived... I didn’t want to be in a box. I wanted to be in a space where I could do whatever the fuck I wanted. And that’s the feeling that birthed Princess Forever.”
Princess Forever coalesces the soft R&B of their previous records with the expansive tones of a more eclectic, Afrobeat-inspired sound. Its lyrics pull from a rich well of imagery: notes of Afrofuturism, spirituality, and a precarious fixation on love shimmer throughout every song.
Musically, the album was a new frontier for Dreamer. But he didn’t want to stop there. One late night in June, he began compiling a moodboard composed of celestial images and the same white holes that had once kept him up at night. “I wanted to make a series of music videos for the album, but not just any music videos,” Dreamer said. “I wanted to make a world.”
“I got a text at 2 a.m. from Dreamer that said ‘I just had an epiphany,’” said Jared Avalos, the director and producer of Princess Forever’s music videos. Months before, Avalos had drafted a storyboard for “Stay Up”, which he envisioned taking place in Alaska. The video didn’t pan out, but his initial idea stuck. Shortly after he received Dreamer’s text, Dreamer and Avalos booked five tickets to Alaska. Dreamer’s swirling, celestial vision began to take shape.
Princess Forever’s visual album contains five music videos, which tell the story of an intrepid space traveler named Princess Forever. Though they are initially tasked with locating an alien planet fit for human life, they’re also on a mission of self-discovery.
Like all successful forays into the final frontier, the making of Princess Forever required an airtight and hyper-specialized team. The core four included director and producer Jared Avalos, cinematographer Kal Kociss, set designer Brandon Sanchez, and Dreamer himself. It might be difficult to imagine how such a small team could realize a vision of such galactic scale, but the group was up to the task. Avalos got his start in the creative industry at sixteen, shooting music videos for his friends. He started his production company, Dreamer Data, as a senior in high school, hungry to explore all that the creative world had to offer. Sanchez, Avalos’s high school classmate, shared this creative drive. His self-made production company, Just For Fun, brought the Chicago-natives to many of the same creative events. It was at one such gathering that Avalos and Sanchez met Dreamer.
“We were at this store called The Gallery hosting a popup event, and Dreamer was there shooting recap footage,” Sanchez, the set designer, said. “He was just like us. Just always working, always making.
Him and Jared kept in touch, and when the time came Jared brought me on to do production design for the video of ‘Really, Really’. It was a very full circle moment.” In 2020, Avalos and Kociss connected in Video Editing 101. Like Sanchez and Dreamer, the cinematographer possessed what Avalos admiringly described as an “almost obsessive desire to get the perfect shot.” Kociss started his filmmaking career as an 11-year-old with an iPod touch. As a teenager, he began shooting short films for online competitions, a practice that has evolved into a budding career on feature film sets.
“Jared and Dreamer often come to me with a story, an image, a visual idea,” Kociss said. “They pass off an image for me to interpret in both a creative and a technical way. By the time the final product gets to our audience, everyone involved has played a part in bringing it to life.”
In our interviews, each member expressed an earnest admiration for their teammates. When asked if he ever had any doubts about the project, Avalos shook his head vigorously.
“With this team, it’s not a question of if something can get done, but how,” he smiled. “We’ve always wanted it bad enough, and that’s all it really takes.”
The first video in the series, “Dumb in Love With You”, sees Princess Forever touch down on Diaspora X, a distant planet on the edge of the galaxy. The astronaut is sent from Terra 2000, a planet that parallels our own. While its inhabitants share our worries and indulgences, its government dispatches astronauts to discover a new planet fit for human life.
“I’m into some nerdy shit, I’m not going to lie to you,” Dreamer said. “It was important to make the videos scientifically accurate.”
To capture the otherworldly landscape of Diaspora X, the Princess Forever team flew to the remote edges of Alaska’s wilderness. Using Dreamer and Avalos’ storyboard as a map, they set off to find new terrain. In many ways, the video’s production mirrored Princess Forever’s solitary expedition in pursuit of a new home.
“It was an incredibly run-and-gun operation,” Kociss said. “We had this tiny team. We had to be selective about gear and conscious of time. And none of us had ever been to Alaska before. We would scout locations in the morning, shoot the videos in the afternoon, and pass out immediately after dinner.”
This spontaneity is woven into the fabric of “Dumb in Love With You”. When Princess Forever looks in wonder at the purple rainforest towering about them, there’s a sense of real astonishment in their eyes. To match this sincere sense of wonder, Kociss opted to use a handheld camera with an anamorphic lens.
“It felt organic....it felt personal. There was a sense of real discovery in the videos, because we were all exploring this landscape together in real time,” Kociss said.
In order to traverse the lightyears that separate Terra 2000 and Diaspora X, Princess Forever needed a spaceship, and Dreamer wanted a practical one. This unique and seemingly insurmountable request raised a number of questions, which were eloquently summarized by Sanchez: “HOW the hell do you build a spaceship?”, “WHERE the hell do you build a spaceship?”, and “WHO the hell builds a spaceship?”.
Luckily, Kociss knew a guy. In fact, he knew two: one who would be willing to construct the ship’s interior for the team, and another who owned an abandoned aircraft hangar outside of Champaign, Illinois.
“The ship’s structure was there, so boom, step one is done,” Avalos said. “But then we had to bring it to life. And that’s where Brandon came in.”
Over the course of several early mornings and late nights, the art director painted, stressed, scratched, and scuffed the rocket’s walls to give it its characteristic lived-in feel. He installed dozens of glowing dials and buttons to its retro dashboard. If any eagle-eyed fans thought that Princess Forever’s space helmet looks eerily like a motorcycle helmet, that’s because it is. Outfitting it with PVC pipes and tubes, Sanchez brought it from the moto-cross course to the edges of the galaxy.
“I remember I was agonizing over this pink stripe that I painted down the back of Dreamer’s seat in the spaceship, even though I knew no one would see it,” Sanchez said. “But those little things matter. They help build out the world. You’re doing it for the artist, you’re doing it for the crew. In the end, the viewer can sense those little things. The world feels more solid, within reach.”
Much of Princess Forever’s production shared this practical approach. Rather than being generated on a computer, the stars outside the spaceship’s window were created by punching holes through backlit pieces of cardboard. When they twinkle, it’s because crewmates waved their arms in front of the lights. There’s something touching about this earnest tactility. The stars that shine on Princess Forever’s galaxy are animated by dozens of crewmates’ hands.
Princess Forever’s second installment, “Fuck Tha World”, sees our intrepid protagonist in a sorry state. After lighting up a celebratory joint in the spaceship’s control room, they return to Terra 2000 with proof of a habitable alien planet. Instead of broadcasting this news to their deteriorating society, the government buries Princess’s findings. We see news clippings implying that their very identity has been buried too; one headline reads ‘WHERE IS PRINCESS FOREVER?’, while a government document announces that ‘ANY AFFILIATION WITH THIS CREW WILL BE SEEN AS A THREAT TO GLOBAL SECURITY’.
“This world mirrors our own,” Dreamer said. “The government does shit like this all the time. And the way Princess Forever responds, that’s a very human reaction too. It’s like a funhouse mirror. Everything is a few degrees of separation from how they really are.”
Princess Forever is seen in a room covered in newspapers and red string, untangling the conspiracy simmering beneath their exile. They’re in a bar, dizzy, surrounded by alien babes in Y2K club wear. They’re drinking. They’re fucking. They’re in too deep. When they leave this bacchanalian scene, a storm cloud follows them. Time at rock bottom incites the self-exploration that drives the album to its climax.
In its exacting execution and exploratory nature, Princess Forever is something of a science experiment. When I asked Dreamer to outline the driving question and hypothesis of the series, they laughed.
“Don’t come for me, but I’m really just trying to get at the meaning of life,” he said. “And Princess Forever is trying to suggest that the meaning of life is love.”
“Technicolor Love”, the centerpoint of the visual series, provides a brief respite from conspiracy and space travel to sit with this theory. Though Dreamer sings about romantic love in the song, the video suggests that life’s meaning can be found at multiple registers; here, Dreamer finds love through nature’s lush embrace. He traverses the forest serenely. He lies his head on a lush bed of grass. The video often slips into surreal, 3D rendered animated segments. A low-poly Dreamer explores a kaleidoscopic forest spotted with waterfalls and trees that seem to shimmer with life. Inside his planet’s verdant landscape, the troubles that plague Princess Forever fall away into a state of spiritual self-assuredness. Freshly in touch with their soul, they prepare to confront the powers that have wronged him.
In order to find “Tha Truth”, Princess Forever needs a team.
“When we were planning the video for ‘Touch Your Soul’, Dreamer kept saying he wanted to ‘assemble an army of bad bitches’,” Avalos said.
“Who wouldn’t want an army of bad bitches,”Dreamer replied some weeks later. “If I’m going to take down a corrupt government, I need my bad bitches there with me.”
Princess Forever’s soldiers are, indeed, bad bitches. But they’re not just any bad bitches, they’re Dreamer’s friends. His circle is as radiant as they are badass. This is perhaps best exemplified by the electric performances of choreographer Mya Shields and dancer Janiah Cooper, who mesh sensual grace with combat-inspired gestures in their performances. (Kociss informed me that he filmed their dynamic movements by zipping around on a hoverboard, a fact that I found both delightful and indicative of the team’s innovative nature).
Armed with white laser guns and a foolproof plan, Princess Forever and his henchmen venture deep into a government facility. We see flashes of a soldier, a businessman, and a child at a desk—are these Terra 2000’s powers that be? As Princess Forever opens a filing cabinet, a message appears. “WITH HELP FROM FRIENDS, PRINCESS HAS GAINED ACCESS TO WHAT WORLD LEADERS CONSIDER CLASSIFIED INFORMATION,” it says. “THEY SAY ‘THE TRUTH’ WILL SET YOU FREE.” As Dreamer pulls a manilla folder labeled ‘CLASSIFIED’ from the file, a final question appears. “WHAT IS FREEDOM IN THIS UNIVERSE?”. Before the screen fades to black, we see Dreamer walking confidently towards the camera in an extraterrestrial desert. It is clear that he is moments away from the answer.
Though the Afrofuturist, “lo-fi sci-fi” concepts driving Princess Forever’s final installment were drawn from myriad sources, no piece of media proved as influential as Sun Ra’s 1972 film Space is the Place. The experimental musician, also known as Le Sony’r Ra, was known for his “cosmic” philosophy, prolific discography, and mythical persona. In Space is the Place, science-fiction, Afrofuturism, free-jazz and radical race politics combine when Sun Ra returns to earth in a music-powered spaceship to battle for the future of the black race and offer an ‘alter-destiny’ for those who care to join him.
If Space is the Place’s influence is something of a bassline for the first four videos in Princess Forever, it becomes a lead solo in “Gimme a Chance”. One of the 1973 film’s most iconic images sees Sun Ra and his nemesis The Overseer sitting at an opulent table in the desert. They play a game of cards with unspoken but clearly significant stakes. In “Gimme a Chance”, Princess Forever finds themself at a nearly identical table, face to face with The Creator of the Universe. The Creator is also played by Dreamer. Rather than playing a game of cards, The Creator performs a Tarot reading that leads to an inter-dimensional battle between the döpplegangers.
In order to mirror the desert landscape of Sun Ra’s film, Dreamer, Kociss, Avalos, and San- chez traveled to the otherworldly dunes of the Mojave Desert. Working with such a clear inspiration in mind proved both challenging and rewarding. Sanchez meticulously arranged a Sun Ra inspired table set with lavish props (a task that was no small feat under the unfor- giving desert sun). Princess Forever and The Creator’s costumes put a lush, textural spin on Sun Ra’s Afrofuturistic style (Dreamer said that showing his Grandma Princess Forever was a highlight of the experience, as it offered him a rare chance to show off his Nigerian roots). Kociss took great pains to recreate the technical aspects of Space is the Place’s production.
“Since movies from that era typically didn’t have great ND filters [filters that reduce the intensity of all wavelengths of light equally from entering the camera], they often have a deep depth of field,” Kociss explained. “Rather than having the subject in sharp focus, you get these equally-weighted layers of foreground and background. In such an interesting landscape, it was important for me to recreate that effect.”
“Being in the desert heightened everything,” Director Avalos said. “And that goes in both directions. We were reaching a boiling point on one segment, and I went and sat on top of the canyon for some peace and quiet. Some- times, sitting with an environment can make things fall into place. After a few minutes, I ran back to the crew and said, ‘I know what we need to do’. And that shot ended up being one of the most iconic images of the series.”
After drawing The Tower in his cosmic game of Tarot, Dreamer scales a precarious mountain in his signature platforms and pink jumpsuit. In the video and behind the scenes, it is a triumphant moment.
“It’s cool, it’s really cool, to have an incredibly specific vision and see it play out right in front of you,” Dreamer said. “I don’t know if that would’ve happened without this team.”
On the last day of shooting “Gimme a Chance”, the Princess Forever team decided to treat themselves to a nice meal. The nearest restaurant in their stretch of the Mojave was, to quote Sanchez, “literally on top of a mountain,” towering high above the endless plains below. The restaurant’s clientele were old, rich, and white. Sunburnt and dirty from their long day at work, dressed in hoodies and remnants of the day’s costumes, the crew stuck out like a sore thumb.
“It was like we were aliens,” Dreamer said. “It was bizarre. We were on top of this mountain and getting stared at like we had antennae.”
Before long, the night turned boisterous. The team shared filet mignon, wine, and every dessert on the menu. The strange looks they’d received all night turned to understanding smiles.
“I think we slowly realized how much we had accomplished,” Avalos said. “I can’t explain how happy it made me to look around the ta- ble at our team and see all these smiles. I don’t think you realize how huge a project is, or how proud you are of it, until you’re looking down at it from the very top.”