Director/Producer - Jon Hozier-Byrne
Director/DoP - Tommy Fitzgerald
Art Director - Raine Hozier-Byrne
Underwater Photographer - Lucy Nuzum
Sound - Alan Scully
Editor - Darragh Moran

A wildly odd experience, for a few different reasons. This multi-faceted project began with the ask of producing the album cover for Wasteland, Baby!, and would expand and stretch to become something of a multi-touch marketing campaign on a global scale.

As with all of the album covers produced by musician and noted younger brother Hozier, the task of creating the artwork itself fell to fragment artist Raine Hozier-Byrne (whom the observant amongst you might have guessed, is our mother). She had a vision of creating a dilapidated, almost post-apocalyptic stately room, deep underwater, into which she would place the submerged artist.

I held a photoshoot in Loftus Hall, noted for being the “most haunted” building in Ireland, in order to gather suitable background imagery, which I then printed on a vast length of vinyl and submerged into a pool. From there, we built out the ‘room’ itself, using various antique objects subtly weighted to the floor. From there, it was simply a matter of filling the Grammy-nominated artist’s pockets with lead weights, having DP Tommy Fitzgerald and photographer Lucy Nuzum don their scuba gear, and creating an effective underwater vignette.

The images taken during the shoot would go on to form the basis for my mother’s oil painting, which would, in turn, serve as the album cover art, which would grace billboards across the globe. The BTS footage captured during the shoot would air as part of a CBS special, and would also be edited into a short looping clip that would appear on a 50-foot billboard on Time Square, NY.