The City of Port Phillip’s acting mayor Serge Thomann has made the local residents ‘Happy’ with their own version of the Pharrell Williams ‘Happy’ video.
The project is part of a worldwide campaign to regionalise the ‘Happy’ video. Pharrell has agreed for his song to be used as long as it was not for a commercial religious or political purposes.
The St Kilda Happy video features local residents like AFL legend Ron Barassi, artist Gavin Brown, world champion skater Renton Millar, members of The Saints football team, the staff of Luna Park and Councillor Thomann himself, who is happy being pushed around at the end of the video by Cr Vanessa Huxley who is the councillor for the Carlisle Ward (East St Kilda).
“When I found out about the European craze of the Happy videos, I straight away wanted to do one to celebrate St Kilda,” Councillor Thomann tells Noise11.com. “I wanted to do it even more when I realised that at the time, there was only one video on the global site wearehappyfrom.com, from Australia, from Sydney”.
St Kilda is the artistic hub of Melbourne. Every year the City of Port Phillip puts on the St Kilda Festival, attracting over 300,000 people. The We Are Happy From St Kilda was designed to reflect St Kilda’s cultural heritage. “I see St Kilda as a very diverse community hub and this the way I wanted to portray it in the film,” he says. “I want to get lots of people together and interact with each other’s. I asked my director Aaron Wilson to work with me and we started the day after! I only realised how tricky it was after we started as we had to make sure that the film was a true and balanced representation of our village. Everybody said yes and after ten days of shooting, 4 hours of footage and many hours in the editing suite, we have a wonderful little vignette of our gorgeous place”.
The We Are Happy St Kilda video was directed by Aaron Wilson, who is the director of the new movie Canopy. ‘Canopy’ is about an Australian digger who meets a Chinese soldier during the war in Singapore in 1942.The movie will premiere in Australia on April 24.
‘We Are Happy From St Kilda’ was shot in various St Kilda locations including the ballet school at the National Theatre, St Kilda Beach and the famous streets of St Kilda, Acland Street and Fitzroy Street. The video was viewed over 12,000 times in the first 24 hours this week. I am amazed with the success the video has received since being released on Thursday morning! Nearly 30,000 hits and growing,” Serge says. “It is the talk of the town! It has raised the spirit of the people who live here and gave them a sense of pride and realising how lucky we were to have so much at our finger tips. I am very happy in St Kilda!”
For the record 86-year old artist Mirka Mora is the oldest star of the video. Rachel Griffiths’ daughter Clementine was the youngest at age 4.
We Are Happy From St Kilda
Canopy trailer
CANOPY THEATRICAL TRAILER – in Australian Cinemas April 2014 from Finer Films Australia on Vimeo.
