Maceo Frost: Dancing, dynamism and identifying the goosebumps

If you were looking for film and advertising director – and surfer – Maceo Frost this summer, you’d have been hard-pressed to pin him down. 

“I’m renovating a camper van to turn into a surf-mobile,” he told me last month from his home in Sweden. “I’m going to Spain and Norway. The Lofoten Islands, up in the north. The nice waves are up in the far north. It’s like the best-kept secret.”  

I made the Lego characters kill each other, and the adults laughed. So I thought, this is a good way for me to express myself. 

You’d have been just as hard-pressed to track him down when he first tuned in to the idea of making films as a 12-year-old, locked in his room at home in Stockholm learning the code to make the video games he played as assiduously as a monk with a rosary. “I’d download these 8-bit games, take screen shots, then make my own pixel characters,” he remembers. 

“Then I got a webcam, and did these Lego animations. The grown-ups thought it was funny, and I made a video for The Beautiful South’s The Perfect Love Song. I made the Lego characters kill each other, and the adults laughed. So I thought, this is a good way for me to express myself. I’m not the one cracking jokes and taking up a lot of space, the films can do that.”

Above: Frost's Grammy nominated animated promo.

Now an in-demand director signed to Knucklehead, his portfolio encompasses spots for Ikea, H&M and BMW, music videos and longer feature work, plus a raft of outstanding dance films, including his break-out piece, Raised by Krump. Through them all Frost weaves a cool choreography of vision, commitment, intuition and intimacy, employing his skills as a skater (like his mum), surfboarder and dancer (like his dad, who was a boogie-boarder, BMX-er and street dancer) to guide his hand and eye as hours of raw footage distil in his edit to a few minutes’ concentrated brilliance. 

Working alone on animation so much had traumatised me. I wanted to go into live-action.

As he talks, you can trace a thread of significant breaks that opened the door onto one project after another. Think of them as big waves to a surfer. The first came when he was still a teenager. He lost his iPad. “It had my number on the back, and I got a call from this guy saying I could come to his office and pick it up. He did Swedish TV graphics, and it blew my mind. This was the exact thing I wanted to learn.” And so he did, the next day deleting all his video games, and spending the rest of that summer animating a music video for a friend that went on to be nominated for a Swedish Grammy. 

“I didn’t write a storyboard – didn’t know that was what you were supposed to do. I did one scene that led to another, then another. It was there I learnt the foundation for a lot of things.” It became a meme, hit a million views fast, and enjoyed the spotlight of that Grammy nomination. He was on his way. The next step was flying to New York to work at global animation company, Buck. But something didn’t click. “Working alone on animation so much had traumatised me,” he says. “I wanted to go into live-action.”

Above: The trailer for Frost's break-out film, Raised by Krump.

The move into live-action comprised all the fun and drama of skater trips with a friend, Leo, which he filmed and edited, and learned “how to turn all this footage into a narrative. That’s how I learnt editing. From nothing into something. Looking for the tempo, the dynamic, the rhythm. Then I did a film of my dad in Central Park, with two dancing friends. Dancing, talking about music, rhythm, finding yourself in the dance. I interviewed them for three hours, and it took a year to get it down to five minutes. That’s where I learnt how to condense hours of dialogue and to find the story, the essence within it, finding the essence of what people were trying to say.”

I thought, what’s in LA? Krump dancers are in LA! So I came up with the idea on the spot. To do something about Krumping.

It’s a skill that has propelled his career ever since. And that five-minute dance film would go on to open more doors further down the line. But it was Ishtar Tussilago, a Norwegian music video with Ishtar Backlund, a long-boarder friend, that opened his way into commercial work and signing with Knucklehead. “A start-up production company in the US saw Ishtar Tussilago and they said, do you want to come to LA, for a meeting. And if you want you can film something.”

He did want. “I thought, what’s in LA? Krump dancers are in LA! So I came up with the idea on the spot. To do something about Krumping.” Krumping is the LA street dance culture pioneered by Ceasare ‘Tight Eyes’ Willis in the noughties. An expressionist, sometimes lacerating, deeply emotive take on the hip-hop 'clowning' craze of the nineties. David LaChapelle explored it in his 2005 film Rize, but Frost’s 2016 take, Raised by Krump, went into a deeper, more intimate, tighter, more inflammable personal space with its dancers. Here, Krump wasn’t just a dance. It was life and death itself.

Above: Frost's music video for Ishtar Backlund paved the way for his move into commercials directing.

He’d filmed Tight Eyes performing in Europe a few year earlier, and set up meetings with him, all the while sensing that “this was a person with a lot of requests... It would take a lot of steps to get him. A lot of people were using the culture for their own benefit.” True enough, once he arrived in LA with a crew, Tight Eyes had forgotten all about filming and was about to fly to Japan. “So, instead of the film being about him, it had to be about the upcoming generation. Where could I find these people?” Tight Eyes pointed him down towards Englewood, and a dance event happening that night. There, Frost met the queen of Krump, Miss Prissy, and another piece of fortuitous luck came his way. 

I’m focused on feeling and emotion. What do you feel when you dance? How does it help you?

“I showed Miss Prissy the film of my dad from Central Park, and she was like, ‘Wow, that guy to the right, I know that guy! I met him in Paris in 2006.’ Shit, that’s great, that’s my dad! So, I got the in. And that opened the doors. She helped me set up some nice situations so that they could magically happen and unfold.”

The heart of the film is not so much in the visuals as the feelings that the dancers transmit, not only in their moves but in the voiceovers that contextualise those moves and why and where they come from. “I’m focused on feeling and emotion,” says Frost. “What do you feel when you dance? How does it help you? Because I’m fascinated with art being an outlet. For them, not a lot of people ask those questions very much.”

With Krump, I decided, this is my style, I found something and I’m going to keep working on it.

Take one example; dancer Christopher ‘Worms’ Lewis told Frost about his father’s death and, the next day, Frost asked him, “Can you dance what you told me yesterday?”. Sure, he could. And months later, in the edit, “I put that interview on top of him dancing, and the words fit exactly with his dance. Their words on top of what they were doing, two different kinds of testimony in movement and speech and music. And when I found that, with Krump, I decided, this is my style, I found something and I’m going to keep working on it.”

Above: Frost's documentary dance film featuring his father.

And so he has done, opening up the heart centres of the stories and characters that light up Nokia Slum Ballet, a branded short following the fortunes of ballet dancers in a Kenyan slum; of Pavilion Daughter of the Seas, starring Lee Ann Curren as a surfer girl about to inherit her dad’s fishing boat; a raucous, revealing Artist Spotlight music profile of Afrobeats star Burna Boy that almost got derailed by a serious illness while shooting in Nigeria; and his adidas-sponsored profile of Cuban boxer Namibia Rodriguez in Too Beautiful: Our Right to Fight, about her struggle against Cuba’s ban on women boxing.

You have a lot more moving mechanisms [with advertising], a lot more money involved, but I’ve been lucky, and good at inspiring people to jump along with my ideas.

At the same time, he’s been honing his storytelling craft by ploughing the world of 30 and 60-second spots. “What’s so good about advertising,” he says, “is I get to practise doing narrative scenes, the dialogue, working with actors, and non-actors. You have a lot more moving mechanisms, a lot more money involved, but I’ve been lucky, and good at inspiring people to jump along with my ideas.”