Kirby Sybert returns to nature (sort of) in the “My Maker” video

A question for fellow concert obsessives: what did you do with all your free time in 2020, when live music was put on hold for the good of humanity? Hopefully you stayed inside with your pods and kept a safe distance from others in the outside world. Perhaps you communed with nature a bit over the summer; hiking trails are plentiful in the woods of Pennsylvania, and if you choose wisely, they can be optimal for social distancing.

If you’re like Kirby Sybert, you found a way to do both those things at the same time. The local singer-songwriter worked with director Ian Fursa to bring the plaintive elegance of his song “My Maker” to life under a canopy of weeping willow and garden shrubbery — or so it seems.

Sybert, a filmmaker in his own right, geeks out big time when talking about the (SPOILER ALERT) computer-generated look that Fursa brought to the video.

“When the pandemic hit, he went full blast into programming a way to create fully immersive backgrounds using LED walls,” Sybert tells us. “This tech has only really been seen in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian, and is still a very new concept. When I heard Ian was working on this technology, I needed to see it.”

Sybert visited Fursa at Mid Atlantic Entertainment’s Bucks County headquarters where the director walked him through the system he created, and the two of them came up with the concept you see in the video.

“With Kirby’s organic soundscape and his reputation for comedic relief, it just felt fitting to have the world you see around him slowly slip away in a single long shot revealing the very inorganic situation we were actually filming in,” Fursa says. “We wanted to give the viewer more of a feeling of being fooled by the man made technology that was seemingly so beautiful at the start.”

“It was shot in a single take and feels like a live session with an interesting twist at the end,” adds Sybert. “The visual totally enhances the message of this track. The idea of being in the moment and that nothing lasts but to enjoy what we have now in front of us.”

Watch below, and check out Sybert’s musical and visual work at his website.