Joshua Ray

The unanimous winner of the 1998 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, SLAM is a 'coming to life' ghetto tale of a streetpharmacist/aspiring rapper who finds salvation in his rhymes. Trapped in Dodge City, a drug-infested war zone in southeast Washington D.C., Ray Joshua (Saul Williams) gets caught up in a drug deal gone bad and is sucked into the criminal justice system. In jailhe finds truth in himself and his craft through Lauren Bell (Sonja Sohn), a beautiful and charismatic writing teacher who leads himto the path of salvation. Using his talent for poetic rap, Ray learns to survive and rise above the pain of his lost generation.

I shot this video with Freddie way out in the desert surrounding Joshua Tree. We found this abandoned shack next to some joshua trees just before dawn and shot the whole video in about three hours. It was produced by Jon McAllister and shot by Ray Huang, I directed and edited the piece. The hard part was we didn't have a boom box to do playback on set. Freddie sang the song a thousand differant ways and it was an editing miracle that we got close to sync on it.