The collaboration between Lobo Marino and All the Saints Theater Company represents a particular kind of artistic intersection: the meeting of puppet theater craft with contemporary music video production. The resulting work, "Come with Me" from the album We Hear the Ocean, emerged from a production at Stonehaven in Richmond, Virginia, bringing together multiple performers—Damion Arrow Muse, Elysia Honey Houghton, Laney Sullivan, Jameson Price, Parker Galore, Shawn Everett Jones, Julie Storey, and Graham Hyphen—with handmade masks and puppets. Director Todd Raviotta, working with Natural Science Productions, shaped this assembly into a single four-minute piece.
The decision to use puppetry and masks in music video production marks a deliberate step away from conventional approaches to performance documentation. Rather than filming musicians playing instruments or singers in traditional concert contexts, this project positioned theatrical objects—handmade puppets, constructed masks—as primary visual elements. This choice carries weight: it suggests a commitment to constructed, rather than naturalistic, performance; to imagination over documentation; to the idea that human emotion and narrative can be channeled through objects rather than faces alone.
All the Saints Theater Company, credited as the sole creators of all puppets and masks, brought specialized craft knowledge to this collaboration. Puppet-making is a discipline with deep roots in world performance traditions—from Japanese Bunraku to Indonesian shadow theater to European folk traditions. Each puppet or mask is a miniature sculpture, engineered for movement and visibility, designed to communicate character and intention without words. The fact that Lobo Marino sought this collaboration, rather than producing a straightforward music video, signals an alignment with a particular aesthetic: one that values handwork, theatrical tradition, and the symbolic power of constructed forms.
The production was anchored at Stonehaven in Richmond, Virginia—a specific location that mattered enough to be credited. This detail, small as it appears, points to a localized creative economy. Stonehaven served as both studio and conceptual home. The presence of an ensemble cast alongside craftspeople suggests a model of production less common in contemporary music video work: not a minimal crew and star talent, but a theater-like gathering of performers, makers, and technicians. Todd Raviotta's direction tied these elements together; Natural Science Productions managed the logistical reality of turning a puppet theater workshop into a music video artifact.
This production model—collaborative, place-based, rooted in handcraft—runs counter to the dominant stream of music video production. Most contemporary music videos favor rapid iteration, digital imagery, minimal crews, and tight budgets. To organize a project involving multiple performers, trained puppet-makers, and handmade objects requires both artistic conviction and practical coordination. The credits acknowledge this labor with specificity: not a generic "special thanks" but named individuals and organizations, each with discrete responsibility.
The song "Come with Me" sits within We Hear the Ocean, an album whose title carries its own resonance. The title suggests listening, attention, witness. It implies an acoustic environment—the ocean as soundscape, not merely as landscape. Whether this album explores environmental themes, contemplative listening, or the metaphorical weight of water as transformation remains evident only to those who encounter the full work. But the title itself, combined with the song title "Come with Me," suggests an invitation, a movement, a gesture toward shared experience.
The music video's willingness to use puppets and masks—forms that require the viewer's imaginative collaboration—aligns with this sensibility. A puppet does not show you what to feel; it invites you to project feeling onto a constructed form. A mask obscures the individual face and offers instead a symbolic surface. Both require an active viewer. Both ask for imaginative participation rather than passive consumption. This formal choice, embedded in the production itself, mirrors the album's invitation to listen, to attend, to move forward with an unnamed "you."
The explicit credit to All the Saints Theater Company for creating "all puppets and masks" underscores something often invisible in contemporary creative work: the presence of human handcraft. In an era when digital effects can simulate nearly anything, the choice to commission actual physical objects—masks that must be worn, puppets that must be manipulated—represents a commitment to tangible, material presence. These objects existed in three-dimensional space; they were photographed, not rendered. They bear the marks of their making: the seams, the weight distribution, the particular choices of their creators.
This materiality matters aesthetically. A handmade puppet carries different visual information than a digital character. It shows age, texture, idiosyncrasy. It cannot be perfectly symmetrical or mathematically smooth. It reads as real—as something that took time and intention to build—even as it functions symbolically, as something more than itself. For a music video to insist on this material reality rather than embrace the speed and flexibility of digital production suggests values worth noting: a preference for slowness, for craft visibility, for objects that announce their own making.
The roster of eight named performers points to an ensemble approach rather than a solo-artist model. Each name—Damion Arrow Muse, Elysia Honey Houghton, Laney Sullivan, Jameson Price, Parker Galore, Shawn Everett Jones, Julie Storey, and Graham Hyphen—appears equal in the credits, without hierarchy or featured billing. This structural democracy reflects a theater-derived approach to performance. In theater ensembles, the collective creates the work; individual talent serves the larger vision rather than commanding it. A music video built on this model would prioritize the interaction of performers, the spatial composition of the frame, the movement and counter-movement of bodies and objects, rather than following a single narrative point of view.
The specificity of the names themselves—several with creative middle names or alternative surnames—suggests individuals aligned with artistic practice. These are not hired actors cycling through a commercial production; they are named collaborators, artists whose identities as makers are acknowledged in the credits.
For anyone interested in the intersection of music, theater, and visual culture, this production model offers lessons. It demonstrates that music video as a form can accommodate the values and practices of live theater: ensemble collaboration, handmade objects, symbolic rather than naturalistic performance, place-based production. It shows that an artist willing to work outside conventional music video production can build something qualitatively different, rooted in specialized craft and community practice.
To fully engage with this work requires viewing it directly—experiencing how the puppets and masks move through space, how the song's sound interacts with the visual forms, what narrative or emotional arc emerges from the four-minute duration. The credits alone cannot convey this; they can only suggest the labor and intention behind it. But in an attention economy dominated by speed and digital synthesis, the fact that this work exists—that it was made at all—testifies to a persistent commitment to slower, more tactile modes of artistic production.
