Kanye West debuted his new single "New Slaves" this past weekend by projecting a video of him singing it on building walls in 66 different locations across three continents. Nine of the locations were in New York, including the Prada Store on 5th Avenue, video of which can be found below. (via Vulture)
Technologist, author and Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil stars in electronic musician Steve Aoki's music video for "Singularity." The narrative part of the video illustrates some of Kurzweil's philosophies which state that in the future, "we'll be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence."
Watch the colorful video for Delicate Steve's "Tallest Heights," directed by animators Becky & Steve. As Rachael Steven of Creative Review explains, "The video uses 16mm, 35mm and super 8 film strips and is part of the duo's experimentation with drawing on top of live action film. The quirky, colorful visuals work perfectly with Delicate Steve's largely non-vocal and slightly psychedelic music, and we guarantee you'll be glued to your screen for the whole four minutes."
Promo News writes: World-renowned fashion photographer Indrani has a stab promo making with her video for the next Alicia Keys single New Day.
Intercut with footage from her iTunes Festival performance at the Roundhouse last year, Alicia can be seen strutting her stuff down a New York alleyway accompanied by a posse of male dancers…
Watch Joe Osborn's stop-motion music video for Helen Austin's "Lovely," which uses over 1000 images to show the song's lyrics being pasted into a scrapbook via magazine cutouts.
Osborn tells Promo News, "The idea was to make a video about a young girls love of the song and I thought there would be nothing more fitting than a scrap book, where the lyrics are spelled out over images of the girl has stuck in of things that she loves, enjoys and places she would like to go."
Joe Berkowitz of Fast Company's Co.Create writes: The history of Rube Goldberg contraptions in pop culture is long and convoluted, like the machines themselves. What it pretty much boils down to, though, is Peewee Herman’s breakfast and that OK Go video--two towering examples of the form. In order to get anywhere near the conversation with these two Hall-of-Famers, you’d better come out guns blazing or risk looking like the board game Mousetrap. A just-released music video manages to avoid being caught in such comparisons.
NOWNESS writes: A furry beast cavorts on the shoreline as Hawaii becomes a psychotropic paradise after being given the CocoRosie treatment in the band's newest video release. Filmed by Mike Basich in the island state, “After the Afterlife” is taken from the forthcoming album Tales of a Grasswidow. “It was exciting to be given so much creative space when working with CocoRosie,” he says. “It was a special project filming it in a place where the girls grew up in their younger years; adventuring through nature, dreaming of other lives in the land of Hawaii.”
Joe Berkowitz of Fast Company's Co.Create writes: The song, "Thrift Shop," which currently has nearly 250 million views on Youtube and has gone double platinum, is not by Macklemore; it’s by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. The fact that both the rapper, whose real name is Ben Haggerty, shares attribution on everything with his producer is a testament to their mutual belief in collaboration. That belief is on full display in the duo’s latest video, and especially its credits.
Philip Harder directs the music video for Low's "Just Make It Stop" which starts out with extreme close-ups of the band recording in a studio until a leafy jungle eventually grows around them.
Go behind-the-scenes of Bat for Lashes' music video for "Lilies" which involved painstaking stop-motion, in-camera special effects and puppetry to create a unique, handmade look. Director Peter Sluszka narrates the making-of. Watch below.
Timelapse photographer Colin Rich's latest project is the music video for Moby and Mark Lanegan's "The Lonely Night." Somehow, Lanegan's gritty voice provides the perfect juxtaposition to Rich's etheral imagery of desert and sky.
NOWNESS writes: Detroit’s dystopian environs are transformed by a psychedelic explosion of color in Jamaican Queens’ new video for “Caitlin.” Local filmmaker Daniel DeMaggio spent the better part of a month adding the swirling, surreal animated visuals to footage shot in one of the city’s many empty spaces. “We created a green screen in a vacant warehouse,” says the group’s vocalist and co-producer Ryan Spencer. “Dan doesn’t have heat at his place, so he stays over at my place when it gets really cold. He’s my favorite artist in the city and when he expressed interest in doing something with us, we jumped on the opportunity.
The music video for Frank Ocean's "Lost" was shot during his world tour last year and directed by Francisco Soriano. The clip sees Ocean taking in his new surroundings during his travels, with Instagram-style filters applied. Watch below. (via Vulture)
Hayley Morris' music video for Iron and Wine's "Joy" is a handmade beauty that she created by "projecting hand-painted water color animations into stop-motion landscapes."
Jordan Bahat directs Fun.'s latest music video for single "Why Am I the One" which features a downtrodden suitcase as its protagonist.
Bahat tells Promo News, "The band came with the idea of shooting a video about lost luggage. So I wanted to create an epic journey for this bag – but I also wanted the viewer to connect emotionally with the bag as if it were a character. As if, when they see the bag, they think of a lost dog or an orphan instead."
Ian Pons Jewell directs the music video for Landshapes' "In Limbo," which provides a beautiful portrait of the city of La Paz, Argentina. The director tells Promo News, "The music ended up working beautifully with everything we saw, allowing us to really hone the narrative to the track timings, despite it being sort of documentary. We were so lucky in getting Marta (Mirian Lidia Mamani) as our protagonist as she was incredible. The production was pretty hard at first, working in a new country, but ended up meeting a great crew here who I have worked with a few more times.”
Get ready to feel old! Director Carly Cussen pays tribute to classic (yes, really) early 2000s girl power music videos like "Bootylicious" with her music video for Little Mix's "How Ya Doin?" The song and video features none other than '00s staple Missy Elliot.
Says Cussen to PromoNews, "I wanted to take a different approach to shooting a girl band. Replacing ‘sexy’ with ‘girl power’ and really showing off the girls individual personalities.”
Emily Kai Bock directs the moody black-and-white video for Majical Cloudz's "Childhood's End," a far cry from the peppy video she directed for Grimes last year. The video stars Twin Peaks star Kenneth Welsh, who also happens to be Majical Cloudz's father.
Creative studio LOGAN takes a step into the exhibition space with Spectacle: The Music Video, a traveling museum show designed by Alexei Tylevich and the LOGAN team. Spectacle provides an immersive look at the history-so-far of the music video, exploring 40+ years of filmmaking and music with a Herculean assemblage of physical, web and print components.
Cat Power's music video for "Manhattan" is -- quite fittingly -- a tribute to New York City directed by Chan Marshall (Cat Power's real name) and Greg Hunt. The video sees Marshall going by some of Manhattan's biggest landmarks including the Apollo Theater and the Brooklyn Bridge as well as the corner bodegas, record stores and dive bars that give the city its local flavor.
Director Ferry Gouw zooms into the grooves of a record and finds a gemoetrical world in shades of gray and, eventually, explosive color in the music video for James Blake's "Voyeur." Watch below. (via Stereogum)
Caroline Polachek duets on Ice Choir's single "Everything Is Spoilt by Use" and also directs the '80s-inspired music video.
Says Polachek about the video, "I staged it as a digital-Victorian (soap) opera. While editing the video, the plastic wrapping kept turning up in my dreams, and became a theme on the streets of Brooklyn. It really got inside me as a symbol. Now I would love for this song to end up as some quiet teenager's figure skating routine. Because this song is gothic as goth can get; no doomy trappings of the genre, but all the pining and excess."
Francesco Lettieri directs the dual music video for electronic musician Raleigh Moncrief's singles "Reflect That" and "First Person." The video takes a hard, unblinking and slow-motion look at the life of a race horse.
Directors Ian & Cooper's black and white music video for Joel Compass' "Back to Me" is a series of gorgeously composed cinemagraphs (the artsy version of GIFs) that tell a mystical story of death and resurrection. Watch below.
Ok Go is teaming up with Saatchi & Saatchi for a music video competition that could potentially see you directing a clip for the groundbreaking band.
Advises frontman Damian Kulash, who has himself directed several of the group's iconic music videos, "Decide what your creative canvas is and stick with it. Give yourself rules. Don’t try to cram in every idea you have. Also, importantly, don’t let your budget or your technology be the defining parameters of your ideas or your work. It doesn’t matter how great your idea is if you can’t execute it well, so define your creative boundaries more narrowly than your logistical ones: make the creative rules tighter than the financial reality, not the other way around. Then you’ll have all the resources you need to do that particular project well and people will see the work, not its failings."
