Our societal Coulrophobia–the fear of clowns–continues around the Carousel, an epic maximalist time-slice short from Adam Berg to showcase Philips new Cinema 21:9 televisions. Distilling a modish SWAT team/clown melée (reminiscent of Batman: The Dark Knight, and reminding me of John Woo’s Hard Boiled), this showcase short offers a masterclass in sensationalist micro-cinema.

Even more impressive is the smoothly executed Philips micro-site which has an interactive video that includes embedded hotspots where the director, DoP, and VFX supervisor give insights into the production.

Time slice has been around for a while, but Berg manages to make it so much more than a technical demonstration. Kudos must go to Philips for being far-sighted enough to not craft naff branding into the piece, letting it stand in its own right, and so take the reflected glory from the fine execution.

More info at Stink.

Congratulations to Smith & Foulkes who’ve just been nominated for the 2009 Best animated short Oscar for This Way Up. You have the opportunity to see the film as a free download from iTunes as part of a Sundance Film Festival tie-in until 25 January.

I’ve been a huge fan of the output of Nexus Productions and Smith & Foulkes (since their Vehicle days), since featuring their work in the early days of onedotzero. The artfully animated comedy short is a Burtonesque crowdpleaser.

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

Archangel’s How To Lose Your Best Friend by Director Eduardo Benchoam through the Guatamalan-based Colectiva arts production company.

Refreshing how a simple idea done right can add some zest to a lo-fi, rough around the edges, video: a simple interactive site allows you to rearrange and follow five characters - remixing the video yourself in a satisfyingly easy and immediate way.

• Linear version | Interactive version

[Via Promonews]

Sans Soleil, Asprovalta, music video from Jonathan Howells on Vimeo.

Synecdoche is:

• a term denoting a part of something is used to refer to the whole thing, or
• a term denoting a thing (a “whole”) is used to refer to part of it, or
• a term denoting a specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, or
• a term denoting a general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or
• a term denoting a material is used to refer to an object composed of that material.

CR Blog has an exclusive first-look at maxi-promo/short film for The Cinematic Orchestra, directed by Up the Resolution. Poignant, beautifully shot short film hybrid. Elegiac memory fragments, punctuated by black fade lacunae.

We were initially approached by Vez, commissioning on behalf of Ninja Tune, to submit two separate animated treatments for The Cinematic Orchestra tracks, To Build a Home and Breathe.

We’d worked with Vez and Ninja Tune before on the promo for Coldcut track, Sound Mirrors, and that video persuaded them we’d be right to pitch something on these tracks which have a similar mood and atmosphere. The difference was a much tighter schedule, and whilst Sound Mirrors was done in down time over a year, both these videos had to be delivered in a fraction of the time so a different approach was called for. We also needed to come up with something different stylistically so we wouldn’t repeat ourselves; working on such low budget six minute promos can only ever really be a labour of love, but they can also be good opportunities to suggest new styles or ideas to clients who are receptive to taking chances.

Nagi Noda RIP.

Would have loved to get her work in Remixing Music Video, but things didn’t come together. Glad I programmed some of her earlier work in the UK though, bringing it to a new geography/audience. She had a tough time as a female creative director in Japan, but managed to break through and create some amazing shorts, and music videos.

[via Tokyo Mango]

Am wondering why more music videos don’t use this milieu, it feels like an area ripe as a visual playground. Jonze sets the bar high as ever, but there’s still plenty of opportunity to make a mark here. Nearest I’ve seen in this territory recently is Roel Wouters with zZz is playing: Grip, which is a live trampoline shoot.

“Michel Houllebecq’s 2006 novel La Possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island) has appeared on the Internet. La Possibilité d’une île is an acerbic piece of dystopian science fiction about a famous French comedian who comes into contact with a free love UFO cult called the Elohimites. The group, who are very obviously based on Claude Vorilhon’s Raelian movement, uses its significant resources to develop human cloning technologies in order to propagate a race of cult clones.”

[Via twitchfilm]

Fading Object from Motioncult on Vimeo.

Michel Gondry picks 25 classic music videos:

• Michael Jackson, ‘Billie Jean’ (1983)
• Peter Gabriel, ‘Sledgehammer’ (1986)
• Red Hot Chili Peppers, ‘Give It Away’ (1991) d. Stephane Sednaoui
• Beastie Boys, ‘Sabotage’ (1994) d. Spike Jonze
• Björk, ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ (1995)
• Herbie Hancock, ‘Rockit’ (1983) d. Godley & Creme
• Jean-Luc Ponty, ‘Individual Choice’ (1983)
• Talking Heads, ‘Burning Down the House’ (1983)
• Téléphone, ‘Un Autre Monde’ (1984) d. Jean-Baptiste Mondino
• The Cure, ‘Close to Me’ (1985) d. Tim Pope
• New Order, ‘Perfect Kiss’ (1985) d. Jonathan Demme
• Beastie Boys, ‘Fight for Your Right to Party’ (1986)
• Run DMC featuring Aerosmith, ‘Walk this Way’ (1986)
• Paul Simon, ‘You Can Call Me Al’ (1986)
• Michael Jackson, ‘Leave Me Alone’ (1987)
• Madonna, ‘Like a Prayer’ (1989) d. Mary Lambert
• Tone Loc, ‘Wild Thing’ (1989) (Robert Palmer parody)
• Young MC, ‘Bust a Move’ (1989)
• Massive Attack, ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ (1991) d. Baillie Walsh
• Lenny Kravitz, ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way?’ (1993) d. Mark Romanek
• Jamiroquai, ‘Virtual Insanity’ (1996) d. Jonathan Glazer
• The Pharcyde, ‘Drop’ (1996) d. Spike Jonze
• Aphex Twin, ‘Come to Daddy’ (1997) d. Chris Cunningham
• Devendra Banhart, ‘A Ribbon’ (2004) d. Lauri Faggioni
• R. Kelly, ‘Trapped in the Closet’ (2005) d?!!

I was asked to write this piece to accompany the MuVi programme for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival music video programme and awards this year. It was a great follow up to being on the jury in 2007, and an opportunity to think of the current big narrative and aesthetic trends in the area.

Conceptually Yours

Dynamic flux is the natural state for the music video artform. The TV station with the three-letter acronym that once dominated pop promo culture has been emphatically sidelined to the offline broadcast past, rendered obsolete in an online age where the embed is king. Without a dominating presence channeling us prescribed, sanctioned (and often sanitised) artist clips, it is harder in the music video world to discern any major overriding theme.

We’re still going through a transitional phase to a full connection with online video’s possibilities. Music video is having a muted moment. There are no great dominating presences, no great white hopes. The visual blockbusters are few and far between. Motion graphics are not hot. Stop motion feels so last year [1]. CG is out, and slo-mo is in [2]. So does this mean things have finally frayed at the seams? Not at all. Is there anything to get animated about? Of course. A brief flash of neon, and a splash of CMYK may be all we get at the moment in terms of visual trends, but the creative threads directors in the field are currently exploring are still an enticing proposition.

The next wave is rolling in, and it is not a stylistic one but conceptual. There is a significant swell in emerging directors creating interesting work. They are tinkering and developing ideas free from being pulled along by any dominating currents. While there’s still room for quirky photorealistic rapping fish (Dom & Nic’s Salmon Dance for The Chemical Brothers), and rutting rabbits wrangled into 3D by Pleix (Groove Armada’s Get Down), animation is more chaotic [3] and aggressive [4] when it is actually seen in the wild compared to the polish and clean vector lines of the near past.

This is, as ever, a reaction to the dominant trend in the last few years of graphic effects saturation. For current directors the tide has definitely shifted: music video’s leading edge has changed from high end animation to lo-fi, rough and ready video creation. Live and spontaneous is the order of the day, which we see in clips for Deerhof’s The Perfect Me and RJD2’s Work It Out. These clips use natural environment to the fullest, and camera composition is defiantly freeform. This change is made explicit in the visual legerdemain of My Robot Friend’s Robot High School video. Director Roel Wouters focusses in on a glossy black ball rolling over a monochrome, geometric landscape evoking early computer animation experiments, only to pull away to reveal a simple handcranked cylinder which is being used to perpetrate the illusion.

The move to everything working ‘in camera’ can undoubtedly be tracked back to the ever-dominant presence of Michel Gondry. His latest Bjork collaboration, Declare Independence, taps into the other clear emerging element. It is what Bjork’s partner, art world luminary Matthew Barney, is absolutely familiar with: moving image as sculptural form. The video performance as performance art–as video art–has never been nearer. This intermingling and borrowing has never been clearer. Mike Mills himself even uses acclaimed performance artist Miranda July as the sole focus for Blonde Redhead’s Top Ranking video.

Music video has gone back to basics. The trawling of high concepts through the video art masters has been catalysed, paradoxically, by the immediacy of YouTube’s webcam hits, and off-the-cuff recordings. Who’d have thought the rise and influence of user-generated content would lead to anything so highbrow?

Matt Hanson is the author of Reinventing Music Video. His moving image blog is at http://eternalgaze.net

Footnotes:

[1] A sublime exception to the rule: Koichiro Tsujikawa’s video for Like A Rolling Stone, by Cornelius
[2] See Kanye West’s Flashing Lights clip, directed by Spike Jonze.
[3] Corin Hardy directed She’s The New Thing by The Horrors.
[4] $$ Troopers for Huoratron, directed by Las Palmas is a prime example.

Elements in video used so effectively to create a binary performance:
Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX
& vintage Oscilloscope for additional visual pleasure

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

[Via CRBlog]

David Lynch’s 55 second short filmed with an original Lumiere camera. 40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, no synchronized sound was permitted, and no more than three takes. David Lynch: Lumière et compagnie [Via BoingBoing]

Note: Links to be restored — WP under hacking attack!!