When bands ask their audience to participate in their new music video, it generally doesn’t get much further than a cameo in the audience of the ‘club-performance’ or at best, the chance to use the artists music to send in your own creation. Apart from the fact that cynics see it as a cheap way of getting result, it’s pretty standard fare. But here’s an interesting one: a music video project that’s based on technology and a global community of UGC-makers.
For their next video, Chemical Brothers and Nexus Productions are asking people around the world to upload a still or short video, documenting “the insanity that goes on at the stroke of midnight”. That’s a nice idea in itself, but the makers want to have material that’s “related to the specific point of origin”, so it can be uploaded and tracked via Google Earth.
Collaborative, open, global and creative. Who knows what the end result will be, but I like the idea of it already.
For the full brief, go here (open until August 25).
I’ve been a bit irregular with postings the last 2 weeks. My first blogging slump. Ouch. The excuse is that I was working on some content for online and mobile platforms. Moving image that is. TV, you know the thing.
Good fun. But then I saw these statistics on mobile viewing from the BBC. A peak of 580 viewers per day isn’t overly impressive now, is it? Especially not for an institution like the BBC.
Two, three years ago, I curated a lot of great content for mobile platforms and helped launching a few ‘channels’ that were broadcast/simulcast for mobile technology. It was pretty successful I was told. I never got to know what that meant in absolute figures, but everyone seemed happy. [Read more]
After my post 2 weeks ago about the use of split screen, I received another example from Straighty 180, a production company in Sydney, who made this music video last year. On the first level it’s just a normal, narrative music promo, but part of the concept was a website where the original video would play splitscreen with another video, together revealing more about the storyline.
Not as interactive as the Pop Levi experiment, but nevertheless a pretty interesting example of cross-platform approach, still quite rare in music video land.
While the music video industry is nervously looking around, trying to avoid gloomy nose-dive scenarios, those Radiohead fuckers do something no one else has done before. Again. An interactive, no-camera-just-code, ready-to-remix video experiment. Genius, right? Or is it just another marketing ploy, as cynics were keen to point out last year when the band gave away their album on a pay-as-want basis?
In the category ‘pretty-useless-but-absolutely-great websites’: I So Wish.
Although tagging it as ‘useless’ is maybe a little harsh. Especially for the makers.
Because creator Andrew Dubber, one of the leading bloggers about the music industry (check out New Music Strategies) started it ‘to make money while sleeping’.
In his recent post about how he and his programmer friend made this site, he extrapolates his concept to the field of the music industry. He pretty much recommends musicians to come up with a similar ‘cash machine’, instead of chasing the rock ‘n’ roll dream of getting signed to a record label, tour the world and make/burn heaps of cash. If they want to be creative, that is.
Today is a historic day. Not only did I finally get my head round blogging, but I also clicked on my first banner. No kidding!
I was checking the Guardian website this morning and for the first time my attention was drawn to the advertising around the article. Result!
I’ve always been a bit skeptical about banners. Last year, Han Hoogerbrugge, an animator/director I work with at my agency Pixelspew, was asked to design an interactive banner for American communication giant Comcast. Despite the fact that the result was fun and playful, we were both wondering who actually clicks on these things. Judging by the agency’s reasonable budget, it had to be quite a few people, but we couldn’t help thinking that the whole banner thing wasn’t really communicating clearly.
But this ad (for a credit card) does its job well. [Read more]
