The Arts and Crafts of Music Videos

by Marc Rickenbach

Continuing our celebration of music videos leading up to ÉCU’s
inaugural Best European Music Video 2011 award, we take a look at some
of our favorite animated and craft-savvy clips currently out there.

The stylized live performance has been the go-to concept since music
videos hit the scene some thirty years ago. Many lack a narrative, and
if they do they tend to be trite and directly reference lyrics. In most
cases we’ve built a sort of immunity to these, but in the last decade or
so, with the help of software and filmmaking equipment becoming more
accessible, videos have taken on the qualities of short, and often,
experimental films. Here are a few of the many that standout:

The Dreamy:

Little Dragon – “Twice”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yedD4JsZyT0

Take a look at Sweden’s Little Dragon who makes use of puppetry in
their video for “Twice.” Not much more than cloth and paper, the video
holds up as a dreamy, hallucinatory narrative short and the band itself
takes a background role. In fact, the band even acted as the puppet
masters as director Johannes Nyholm brought it together.

The Trippy:

WhoMadeWho “I Lost My Voice” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzjR6paFtpE

Scandinavia’s WhoMadeWho turn to experimental video art for their “I
Lost My Voice” video. Using paper cut-outs and manipulating them in
post-production, we’re left with a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes
that ends up being pretty entertaining, despite its simplicity.

The Artsy:

Hold Your Horses “70 Million” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erbd9cZpxps

Sounding more like a band straight out of the Midwest, French group
Hold Your Horses! have crafted one of the more original videos in the
last few years. Drawing from influences that currently hang in the
Louvre and various other museums around the world, HYH! recreate famous
paintings with themselves as subjects. It’s a playful take on the
performance video and definitely worth all the labor intensive work it
took to set up these scenes.

The Psychedelic

Breakbot “Baby I’m Yours” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6okxuiiHx2w

French DJ, producer and short filmmaker, Breakbot’s new video for “Baby I’m Yours” is a Casino Royale-like
clip that mixes live action rendered to look like watercolor and
original animation that makes you think you just fell back into some
sort of modern day Studio 54. The only thing not to like about this one
is that it isn’t playing on an IMAX screen.