YODA: Crash-Landing Tech and Wayne on Dankobah

YODA put Tech N9ne and Lil Wayne on the same track, from the album 5816 Forest, and the title handed me the whole world. The song is called YODA. Yoda lives on Dagobah. So we crash-landed Tech and Wayne on our own version of it, a swamp planet the crew ended up calling Dankobah, and built a full Star Wars homage around them.

A practical stage, a CG universe

We shot April 3, 2025 at L.A. Castle Studios in Burbank, overnight, on a practical futuristic stage: part recording studio, part spaceship cockpit, the place Tech and Wayne perform from. The set was real. The windows were green screen. Everything past the glass, the swamp, the trees, the sky, the ships, was built later in full 3D.

That split is the whole trick. You keep the performances tactile and lit for real, then you hand the world beyond the windows to VFX so it can be as big as the record deserves. We shot 4K anamorphic on Atlas Orion glass on RED Komodo, delivered flat in LOG, and graded it all in DaVinci so the swamp greens and the hyperspace blues could be pushed hard in the finish.

A drone finds them, and the ship rises

The story outside the glass runs like a Star Wars cold open. A security drone drifts through a mist-shrouded swamp and finds their ship half-sunk in the bog, the way Luke's X-wing sits in Dagobah. From there the ship strains free of the mud, kicks up water and engine wash, climbs through the treetops, and finally punches into a hyperspace jump that carries the rest of the video. It ends on a new planet system, the drone long gone, two legends flying off toward somewhere better.

Hidden in the HUD

The drone sees the world through a green Imperial-scout interface: scan lines, target reticles, readouts that pulse on the lyrics. I tucked the credits inside that UI, so 'Directed by Cameron Logan Cox' and 'Executive Produced by Travis O'Guin and Aaron Yates' flicker past as part of the drone's display instead of a title card. The lightsaber transition that slashes across the frame I built myself, plasma edge, scorch, and all.

Shooting two legends in one frame

DP Jackson Montemayor and I designed the photography so Tech and Wayne could share the same space without competing, two performances lit and blocked to feel like one world rather than a split screen. Wayne came in on pure instinct and sent hook options in a matter of days; the one that made the cut brought a loose, laid-back counterweight to Tech's intensity.

Editing to the syllable

I cut the video so the edit follows Tech's bars. Tech N9ne's delivery is percussion, and the cut treats it that way: cuts landing on syllables, camera moves timed to his cadence, the video breathing exactly where the verse breathes. When the edit and the vocal lock like that, viewers feel the video is 'fast' even in the shots where nothing moves.

• Let the title write the world. YODA gave me Dagobah for free; the whole concept fell out of one word.
• Split practical and CG on purpose. Real performances behind the glass, a limitless universe beyond it.
• Hide your credits in the world. A drone HUD beats a title card every time.