Video Chats: Matt Alonzo on "Girls Just Gotta Have Fun" by Sophia Grace

A few weeks ago, the internet was taken my storm by 8-year-old Sophia Grace’s debut music video, "Girls Just Gotta Have Fun," directed by Matt Alonzo. The video features Sophia in her signature tutu (made famous through Sophia’s many appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show), packing as much sass as possible into her 3-foot frame. While still allowing her to feel like a kid, and not making things too serious, Matt still able to give Sophia the hip-hop diva treatment, which is exactly what she deserves. We talked to Matt about the video, working with an 8-year-old, and making sure to pull inspiration from age-appropriate places.

Doug: How did you get involved with this project?

Matt: I was actually at Tyrese’s house. Tyrese’s lawyer is her manager, or represents her right now. I was over there just hanging out, and he played the song and I knew her voice, I just couldn’t put my finger on exactly who it was and knew it was like a smash right when I heard it. I just couldn’t believe a little kid was singing it, and then he told me who it was and that he wanted us to shoot the video. I told him I was totally in. I definitely wanted to be a part of it. That’s pretty much how it started and it just kind of went from there. It was good. It was all in the family, so that’s always nice.

Doug: Were they going for a certain look, or did they let you take control what you were thinking for the song. Were they looking for a hip-hop video, what did they ask for?

Matt: The song was very poppy and obviously, she’s so young that you don’t want to do too much with her. That was a big issue as far as I was concerned. They weren’t too familiar. They hadn’t shot a video yet, so they didn’t really know what they were looking for. They just wanted to make it friendly for her age group, and not too Hollywood. They wanted to have a little party with her little friends around. So we just kind of ran with that idea and added some stuff on to it and went from there. They pretty much let us take care of everything.

Doug: She’s crazy charismatic in the video. She’s also got a history of performing in front of people, it’s not like this is her first time around. Was she easy to work with because of that?

Matt: She was great to work with. She turned it on as soon as the camera went on. One thing though is that she has TV experience, so it was hard for her to look into the camera because she had been told for the last couple of years not to look in the camera, when she was on Ellen or whatever other show she was on. So, that was a little bit of a tricky hoop to jump through, but eventually she got it. We just kept coaching her, and hyping her up, and telling her how good of a job she did, making sure that she was happy and excited. She was so thrilled and it showed on the screen.

Doug: What about her patience level, because you mentioned she’s got a lot of experience, but there’s a difference between performing one song in front of Ellen’s audience versus performing 10 seconds of a song 25 times in a row for a shot. What was her patience level on set?

Matt: She was excited about every take. Sometimes she said, “We have to do it again?” But she’s still young. She’s not like Dakota Fanning where she’s an 18-year-old inside of a 10-year-old body. She’s truly a little girl. She likes to have fun and just hang out. She was excited just with the cameras and everything going around her. She was thrilled to do everything, especially when she was driving the little car, she couldn’t care less how many takes we did, she just wanted to keep driving the thing. She was having fun, and she had previous practice recording the song. Apparently they recorded it for like 10 hours and she had to just keep singing it and singing it and singing it, so she understood what she had to do for the video.

Doug: Sophia first got discovered through her rendition of a Nicki Minaj song, and she even dropped Nicki’s name in the lyrics of this song. Did you pull from anything Nicki Minaj has done in any of her videos, or is it too difficult to translate what her video persona is to a 10-year-old?

Matt: Exactly. I tried. I looked at a couple Nicki videos and it’s just really hard. At first I was trying to play with like maybe we’d do the "Sky’s The Limit" thing they did for the Biggie video, with kids playing the parts of all of the members of Bad Boy and Jr. Mafia. But we actually still got some backlash with the video we put out, so I didn’t want to push it too much. I didn’t want to really pull references from any videos, or do anything too Hollywood, like I said, just to keep her in that box that she’s in. Like I said, she’s a 10-year-old girl, so I just didn’t want to push it too much and as we all know, Nicki is a little sexy. We didn’t want to cross any of those paths with her. She’s a little girl, we wanted to keep it fun and cute, and that’s what we did.

Doug: Obviously, this is a little different project than you’re typically working on, but is there a point where it just is all filmmaking? Whether you’re working with a 30-year-old dude from Compton, or a 10-year-old girl from Britain, at some point does it become the same thing for you?

Matt: Yeah, it’s all pretty much the same thing. You figure out who your target market is, and then you make sure that you stick to that lane. You know when you’re with her, it wasn’t The Game, it wasn’t Xzibit, it wasn't any of these other artists where you’re going to do something crazy, but at the same time, we stick to the filmmaking and we have some fun. We kept the video very basic. I didn’t want to add too much flare to it, to cross any lines or anything like that. But, at the end of the day, it’s all pretty much the same thing, the cameras go on, the lights go up, and you go.

Doug: Does one genre ever influence the other when you’re working, or do those things not really cross paths?

Matt: I think everything influences everything. We put some little lens flares in there that I had previously done on a Game video, but we didn’t do it to the extent. We weren’t trying to accomplish the same look, we just wanted to add a little bit of pop. I think everything kind of crosses. You get influences from everywhere, but at the end of the day, I just really looked at who the target market is for that particular artist and I just tried to appeal to that audience. If they do want to go to a wider audience in the target market, then we look at that when that situation arises. Other than that, I think everything influences each other, but you really just look at the artist and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Doug: Do you think that working on a video like this will help to diversify your personal reel?

Matt: Definitely. It’s something new. It’s fresh for us, it’s fresh for our eyes, it’s fresh for our minds creatively. Just go have some fun, put a different hat on and it’s just refreshing. It definitely helps open up other doors that weren’t open before and could help lead to some other opportunities that weren’t present before we did the video.