LOUISVILLE, KY — The first-ever official music video for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” won an Ohio Valley Emmy Award on Saturday night. Director Max Moore accepted the award at the 62nd annual ceremony at the Galt House in Louisville, where the video was honored in the Arts & Entertainment category. Chronicle Cinema produced the video.
The win caps a remarkable year for a song that spent more than five decades without a video. Since its release, the piece has passed 30 million views, an audience that continues to resonate with this song from over 50 years ago is incredible.
Instead, the video tells a story: an older man and his younger self, a first love, and the motorcycle that carried it. Moore and the Chronicle crew shot it over three days in and around Louisville and southern Indiana, building a 1970s diner from scratch, running a motorcycle-and-drone sequence at dusk, and treating a piece of music history with the care it had been waiting on since 1973.
“Max brought us this project, and it’s a song everybody already knows by heart,” says Zach Meiners, president and creative director at Chronicle Cinema. “You don’t get many shots at something like that. Watching him walk up and accept an Emmy for it was a hell of a way to finish out this project.”
Moore has worked with Chronicle Cinema for years across music videos and branded work. The “Free Bird” video was produced through Chronicle Creates, the company’s original content arm, with a Kentucky crew and locations throughout the region.
The video is streaming now, and the full story of how it came together (the diner build, the drone rig, the casting of a face that had to carry fifty years in a single look) is in our behind-the-scenes feature.
