In one my last posts I mentioned the power of frameworks that could create a bit of structure in ’social curating’. Same goes for self-publishing, I feel.
It’s all good to wack your film onto YouTube and hope that millions of people will fall over laughing. But there’s so much content around these days, it could be a rather difficult task to get noticed. Even if you’re a genius at adding the most inventive tags to your work and twitter about your output like there’s no tomorrow. 
So attaching it to an existing brand, placing it in an existing environment (could just be a YouTube channel) is possibly another efficient way of getting your work noticed. If a trusted brand says you’re good, you’re good. 

Anyway, all very heavy words to say I really like what the guys from 99$ Music Videos are doing. They’re asking film makers to hook up with musicians and make a video for 99 dollars. In one day. They’ll show it. 
A very fun and pure idea that’s all about creativity and the basics of music videos. But if they get enough people to send in material, they may just become a little hub for creative music videos. And I’ll definitely follow them to spot new talent. 

Via @camlevin

The power of a good, creative music video remains. Here’s another commercial that’s inspired by a pop promo.

I guess that’s what those poor, struggling, starving, but highly creative music video directors are left with these days. Get the chance to develop a strong conceptual, visual idea, hoping that it will be picked up by an agency creative.
Still, they have to be kind enough to ask you to direct it. That’s the case here though: both films were done by the same director, Tom Kuntz, who recently also directed that rather fun Cadbury’s ad. Busy chap. 

But I always found it strange that production companies (who ‘rep’ their directors) don’t find ways to make more use of their roster’s creativity. In times of convergence, cross-platform and transmedia, should a production company not (partly) act as a creative agency as well?

What’s interesting to see is that labels, who have traditionally been quite averse to embracing internet technology are now realising the digital potential. Big time. Major label commissioner Tim Nash (who won the award for Best commissioner at the recent UK Music video Awards) writes a very entertaining blog about his lovely job and gave an insight in how they deal with the ‘Truth Tube’ and how they’re analyzing the viewing behaviour and the tagging of their videos. Turns out that 52 seconds is the average ’switch-off moment’.

As a fan of creative music videos and with quite a few talented directors in my close circle of friends, my heart breaks and weeps when I read this. It’s scary to see how the big corporations are desperately trying to take the risk and failure out of what we always believed to be a creative industry. Sure, from a commercial point of view you can sort of understand them, but we can only hope that the stats don’t get applied to each and every band.

My prediction is that music videos will become similar to tv commercials. They’re no longer the sine qua non of advertising, but for washing powder (read: hits! hits! hits!) it’ll still work. And for the more aspirational brands (read: more creative artists), the future of ‘music marketing’ will move more towards inventive campaigns like the Oasis one I wrote about before, highly creative material (video, websites,…) that translates the creativity of an artist and personal communication like blogs and documentaries/video blogs that give an insight in the wonderful world of musicians.

So here’s to a creative 09.

We recently moved studio and one of the guys that I bump into every now and again in the kitchen is Noah Harris, who just finished this rather lovely ad for Ford Fiesta – This Is Now. It took him a good 7 months to finish, but it’s well worth it.
In good Web2.0-open-collaboration style, he got a bunch of designers/animators on board to create all the gorgeous visuals that show in the screens. Very now indeed. 
Now, I would have thought that Ford would include all the individual pieces on some microsite, get people to comment etc etc, but nope. They seem to have a microsite for this car, but no films. Instead they’re all on YouTube and you can watch them here.

Another rather talented director that sits in spitting distance from me is Tom Haines, who made this lovely music video for crazy Texan band White Denim. It has just been picked as video of the week on 6Music and it was criminally ignored for a nomination in the category Best Indie/Alternative video at the UK MVAs.

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).

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. 

This ‘music video multiplex’ for Pop Levi is already a few weeks old, but at the time I hadn’t started the noble art of blogging yet, so I thought I’d post it again. In case you hadn’t seen it. 

Although I really like the idea, the execution isn’t overly great. So it won’t be long before someone really explores the interactivity opportunities. I’d like to see more screens. And why not more moments where you have to pause/play/rewind to complete the video. Or make your own version for that matter. 

I reckon this could be something for director/artist Roel Wouters, you know: him from the live-installation trampoline concept for the rather fantastic zZz video.

Which by the way has just been re-used for this car ad. Quite badly re-used, I should say. Bit missing the point really.
Does anyone know whether Roel got to make that himself? It’s the same music, but I heard that he declined.

Bloody Radiohead. They’ve done it again.

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?

I think you can judge from a few angles. 

From a creative point of view, I feel it scores well.
Apart from the fact that I’ve never really seen anything like it, it’s a great piece of visual expression that is typical for the band/brand Radiohead.
I also think that as a piece of filmmaking it does have its values. I watch a lot of music videos and my attention span is close to that of a goldfish, but this video kept me watching. Quite a feat. 

From an interactive point of view it’s a bit limited. The fact that it’s open source is obviously a genius thing. But unless you’re quite a geek -and let’s be honest, not that many of us are- it’s hard to interact with the work. In that way, Arcade Fire’s attempt last year was more successful, be it less aspirational. 

Technologically I’m sure it’s all great, but I personally couldn’t care less. Velodyne Lidar technology, whatever. 

And marketing-wise? A success, no doubt. After 3 days it’s already racked up more views on YouTube than a lot of it the band’s older videos. And which music video has recently received that much attention in the broadsheet media (ok – it’s the online version, but still). And has a collaboration with Google. 
But is that because Radiohead had a clever marketing plan? Or because it’s a great piece of work and worth the attention? 

One last point. Is this the solution to the flailing music video business? Obviously not. Although I’m sure production companies are already thinking about how to ‘implement’ this and score a YouTube hit themselves, this video really is just one example of doing something creative that also gets noticed.
Afetr all, even Robbie Williams made ‘interactive videos’ 5 years ago.