Keep an eye on that Google Alert, musicians. Artists’ next music videos may emerge from the ether, the work of young amateurs, rather than commissioned by labels. Recently, I made a plea to avoid bland music videos, accompanied by a parody that neatly summed up the worst cliches. What’s remarkable to me is that some of the freshest video ideas are coming from experiments by young artists.
Capturing the dark, off-beat character of Nicolas Jaar’s music, we see a new video for Keep Me There, a twisted short film. Shot in one week, edited in three, and produced on a shoestring budget of EUR220 (really), a small team with an average age of 20 based in France pulled off the whole work. Lucas Duchemin writes CDM:
I’m a great fan of Nicolas Jaar’s music, a friend and I started to listen to his LP album over and over. The idea of meeting him visually was thrilling, so we decided to create this old cop Gregorino, eaten alive by his pale existence. Once we found the idea for the video, we only had to start from scratches. [sic]
I love the pacing of the edits, which seems appropriate. In this case, the authorization was all official – label Circus Company signed off, so long as the video was marked “unofficial.”
Pretty soon, “unofficial” could be a badge of honor for music videos and their original recording artists.
If you have any responses or questions, fire away in comments.
Inhabiting the same milieu, to me, a story we picked up previously (and which in turn has seen more films added since our coverage):
One-minute Short Films on Canon 5D, Like Love Poems to Photography