The UK Music Video Awards 09, which celebrate the best work in promos over the last 12 months, are open for entries.
The awards launched last year, when directors including Nima Nourizadeh, Kinga Burza and Eran Creevy all picked up gongs for their work. As with last year, there will be a gala ceremony taking place in London where the winners will be announced – this year taking place at the Odeon West End in Leicester Square on October 13.
The deadline for entering the awards is August 13. Several new categories have been added to the awards this year, including best animation, best live music coverage, and best music ad (TV/online). There is also an ‘innovation award’, which recognises the ways in which music videos are changing with the rise of interactive technology. All info on entering the awards or attending the ceremony is at ukmva.com.
Like nudity? Like candyfloss? Then you’ll love this new video for Lolly Jane Blue track White Swan, directed by Sil van der Woerd.
The atmospheric film was shot in a disused coal mine in Beringen, Belgium, and, according to the press blurb, “tells the story of an exhausted, shivering girl who is captured in a dark machinery world where she dreams of being taken away under the wings of white swan”. It is the second collaboration between Blue and Van der Woerd – the first was the music video Worms.
On shooting the film, Van der Woerd (who has just signed to Annex Films in London for UK representation), comments: “Shooting a video backwards, in the middle of the night, with a naked girl on a stone-cold floor in ice-cold rain was…. challenging to say the least.” And the candyfloss in the film is all real too – it was made fresh during the shoot.
From Stephen Frankfurt’s beautiful title sequence for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
In our August issue, Adam Lee Davies looks at the continuing rise of the film title sequence since its artistic resurgence in the 1990s. In his article, Better Than the Film?, he talks to many of the genre’s leading practioners such as Kyle Cooper and Garson Yu. For CR Blog, Davies has selected 30 of the best title sequences ever made…
His sequence for the recent 007 outing, with Chris Cornell giving it his all, is equally eye-popping, but looks like a very expensive car ad – much like the film
Shynola has directed this super charming video for Coldplay’s rather blah new single, Strawberry Swing. Interestingly, like Jonathan Glazer’s recent Dead Weathers video, the Coldplay vid has been promoted via a trailer on YouTube (shown above), but can be seen in full on Babelgum.com now, and will also play out in UK Odeon cinemas from later this week, before both Bruno and The Proposal. Music videos on the big screen… could this be the future?
German agency DSG has created a nice, if over-long, film to mark the 50th anniversary of the Olympus PEN camera. YouTube commenters, however, have been quick to point out its similarity to an earlier film
The DSG film (above) tells the story of one man’s life in stop motion. As is explained on its YouTube posting “We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post-production!”
However, it does look remarkably like Takeuchi Taijin’s Wolf and Pig film
Eliza Williams’ piece The YouTube Dilemma from our May issue (which you can read here) discussed the difficulties ad agencies are getting themselves into over YouTube. On the one hand, here is a rich source of ideas to “borrow” and adapt for campaigns; on the other, is the realisation that they cannot get away with simply taking others’ ideas for their own use as they would have done in the past.
And this is where Olympus and DSG seem to have got themselves into a pickle. In response to commenters pointing out the obvious debt the Olympus film owes to Taijin’s piece, the following has been added: “Some of the comments we have read here suggest that we should mention the creator of “A wolf loves pork”, Mr Taijin Takeuchi. While we were looking for a way to realise a story describing “a journey through time” based on printed images, we were inspired by Mr Takeuchi’s brilliant work. For this reason we intentionally quoted his work in our little movie while showing full respect to his original idea. We didn’t mention his name because we did not want to do so without his prior agreement. However after considering some of the comments posted here we have decided to add credits to him and his work, which we obviously absolutely love.”
Hmmm – not really helping themselves are they?
What makes it all worse is that the PEN is a fantastic camera (the original was designed by Yoshihisa Maitani of OM series fame) and deserves better. The Olympus site features this more appropriate and charming film that has the advantage of actually explaining what the camera does – the new EP-1 has interchangeable lenses.
So not only has the agency embarrassed itself by being caught out, it has done so in making a film that doesn’t tell the viewer anything about this wonderful piece of kit except that it’s 50 years old.
Thurso is very nearly as far north as you can go in mainland Britain (it’s the last town you come to before John O’Groats at the very tip of Scotland). It also happens to be the lead track on the first EP from Glasgow band, Over the Wall, the latest signing to Motive Sounds. The band have a lovely animated video to support their new release too, directed by Dan Sutherland of Red…
The video sees OTW duo, Ben Hillman and Gav Prentice, perform their song via a number of nostalgia-laden educational books; the offset colours and clunky animation suiting the pair’s brand of lo-fi pop perfectly.
The sleeve for The Rise and Fall of Over the Wall EP has been designed by Barry Smith who, when not designing for Glasgow studio Marque, does his own thing as Create & Consume.
Smith is no stranger to CR, having originally been one of our One to Watchers back in ooh 2003 or 4 (we’ll check), and part of our feature on Motive Sounds’ excellent creative output that we documented in 2007.
As well as releasing some fine musicianship (check out out Mt. and Manatees, who CR saw live recently with the OTW chaps), the label also believes strongly in promoting good packaging design as well as good sounds.
Mainframe has created this series of virals to accompany the release of James Palumbo’s debut novel Tomas, a timely book that sets out to chronicle some of the more sordid aspects of the age in which we are living (and as a co-founder of the Ministry of Sound this is a subject that presumably Palumbo knows well).
Champagne Fuelled Jungle
“Bloated bankers, Russian roubles, salacious socialites and filthy footballers: this is the meaning of life in the new millennium,” explains the website promoting the book, tomas-book.com. “Controlling it all is SHIT TV, the ultimate reality channel, which dares to put homicidal dwarves on rollerblades and obese mamas in tutus. Reluctant celebrity Tomas has had enough. Armed with a Tommy gun and a revolver, he sets out to teach the world a lesson and becomes a Messiah in the process.”
The book is illustrated by a series of drawings by Neal Murren, which bring some of its debauched scenes to life, and these form the basis of the viral films by Mainframe. “The artwork in the first place was great, really detailed and dark imagery,” says Mainframe director and animator Mark Warrington. “It was great to work with such a strange subject.”
Cocks Away!
Warrington turned the eight still images in the book into the one-minute animations. “I deconstructed each image into characters and background elements,” he says. “I animated around what I was given and then added new background elements.” The final films feature some imaginative moments including a terrifying torture scene involving a naked man strapped above a mob of baying and drooling pigs. “The book is quite surreal,” says Warrington, “Greasy businessmen are represented by hyenas grabbling over champagne and there is a huge-breasted woman on wheels who is a trophy wife.” It was not a run of the mill job – “Having to create dancing cocks is not in the everyday line of work,” he remarks.
The original illustrations by Neal Murren which were commissioned by Baby who art directed and designed the book. Here are photos of the cover and some of the illustration spreads:
Treat Me Like Your Mother by The Dead Weather, directed by Jonathan Glazer
This video for Treat Me Like Your Mother by The Dead Weather, Jack White’s latest project, is directed by Jonathan Glazer. With such big names involved, the promo has received quite the hype – a trailer for it played out online in expectation of the first airings on TV, which took place over the weekend in the US and will play out tonight on Channel 4 (at a graveyard slot at 12.10am) in the UK.
The danger of such hype is of course whether the final product will live up to expectation, and here it is uncertain whether it does. The film shows White sizing up to The Kills’ Alison Mosshart in a duel, with both protagonists touting machine guns. With such a premise, you’d expect things to get really gory, but oddly they don’t, and it all ends up seeming a bit tame. Both White and Mosshart show that they can wear a leather jacket very well indeed, but is that enough to justify all the fuss?
Australian agency The Glue Society has created a music video to encourage applications to an internships programme, plus more great work from Feed
The video, to a track by The Bumblebeez, aims to attract interest in a programme run by the V Energy Drink to offer internships at some of Australia’s leading creative companies. See the video on our Feed section here
Also on Feed, a bizarre and beautiful film from 3D artist Hugo Arcier (watch it here)
And this magazine for TopShop by Claire Huss (full story here)
And another magazine, Revista Deluxe from Brazil (see here)
And a Ben & Jerry’s campaign from Singapore (see the rest here)
The Economist is to debut a new commercial on 3 July which seeks to reach out to a younger potential readership. Red Wires, from agency AMV.BBDO and directed by Tom Carty (he of Guinness Surfer fame), stars wire-jumper Florent Blondeau walking through a city on a series of red wires.
The film is somewhat reminiscent of Carty’s earlier Rush Hour spot for the BBC. According to The Economist, the spot “marks the beginning of The Economist talking to people who might not yet consider themselves to be Economist readers through its marketing and advertising. It was sparked by research undertaken by the magazine last year which discovered that, because of the rise in the number of people going on to university, there are now over 3 million people in the UK whose interest in world affairs, travel, news and politics suggests an unconscious affinity with what The Economist reports on every week.”
In that respect, it follows from the AMV print campaign that we reported on last June, which was also targetted at a younger audience than the traditional white on red ads that are held in such reverence by the industry. The Economist says that the “Let your mind wander” endline is “a metaphor for the inherent pleasure in connecting different ideas, and how this is reflected in the wide-range news and analysis available in a copy of The Economist”.
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And another magazine, Revista Deluxe from Brazil (see 
