It’s Friday, folks. You don’t want to think. You want to give your eyeballs a nice dip in cool, refreshing retinal stimulation. Grab a fistful of eye candy and relax on the couch. Here are just a few to get you started; feel free to add more fodder for weekend watching on comments.
CDMusic was host this week to some quite inspiring music videos, stimulating our musical and motional taste buds at once.
Final Fantasy’s “Horsetail Feathers,” from earlier this year, perfectly evokes the dreamworlds of the artist. Retro cinematography may be all the rage, but here it blends into something quite unique. And that seems to me to be the point of visuals in our time – with time itself collapsed and digital access to every media, the key is to look for style.
The article:
Upcoming Final Fantasy Album: Treating the Orchestra Like an Analog Synth
Music video directed by Tracy Maurice www.barbarianlust.com / Cinematography and Editing by
Matt Moroz
Tracy Maurice has a wonderful, surrealist style; see also her incredible video for Arcade Fire.
From Ethan Goldhammer today, we have two wonderful “light painting” videos. If you thought you were tired of this effect, watch what happens when light painting and stop motion are used creatively, not just for the gimmick itself but to make an actual video statement. Ethan also has an interesting workflow: start in Final Cut Pro, warp in Ableton, export back to FCP, edit. Check out today’s story:
Exquisite Music Video Paints Sound, Rhodes, Moog in Light Paint
In the Pocket (Rhodes and Moog Light Paint) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.
Air on a G String (Oscilliscoped) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.
Lastly, from the CDMotion inbox, this video of the Helicopter Boyz, sponsored by Nikon, imagines what would happen if two kids were suited up in outfits covered in cameras. There’s lots of clever design work, though it appears that there is not any use of live camera images or live motion tracking in the final routine; as near as I can tell, it’s all choreographed in advance. That doesn’t make it any less clever or stylish. It does, however, suggest something unusual. Normally, people do cool, independent work that gets stolen by big agencies for companies like Nikon. Here, we have cool work that needs to get stolen and done in real-time, better, by the underground. Agreed? (Anyone with additional details on this project, let me know. And yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of projects haven’t done similar things already, though I challenge you to get THAT many cameras on at once and dance live, too! Via the awesome Today and Tomorrow.)