5 Seconds Of Summer reinforce their stronghold on that sweetspot between pop/punk and boy band thanks to this cartoonish tale about rallying all the underdogs for a parade that would make Delta Tau Chi proud.
Isaac Rentz, director: "This is my 4th video for the band. They're always fun to work with because they have a great sense of humor but they also take the message behind their videos seriously. The band wanted to make something with a revolutionary theme that showed them sticking up for underdogs. I worked with my production designer to create a mad max-style vehicle that they would drive through the suburbs, made completely from scraps that you'd find in a neighborhood garage. It was an intense night shoot, with hundreds of extras on the Warner Brothers studio lot. I was nervous about it all coming together, but I remember the first moment we saw the band rounding the corner on that big smoking, blinking vehicle, we all knew we had found the right visual to match the song."'
Just in time for Awards season, director Isaac Rentz revamps his "Hero" video with footage from the celebrated film Boyhood, for which this song serves as the theme song.
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. Metallica at Alcatraz. 5 Seconds of Summer at a women's prison? It might not seem to have the same cultural impact, but then you might not have ever seen 20,000 otherwise good girls all lose their collective minds to these boys.
Chances are 5 Seconds Of Summer won't remember what it's like to just hang around and waste time with your friends, especially as they continue their supersonic trajectory to stardom over the next year. So, maybe "Amnesia" will be a nice video reminder of how things were once upon a time...
Is it ok for a grown man to admit that he misses MTV's TRL? Of course it is, especially if that man is a professional director who closely studied each music video on that countdown, picking up all sorts of cinema and style tricks along the way.
The man in question is Isaac Rentz, who has a new tumblr with the self-explanatory title, This Day In TRL. And a quick read of blog may make you wish for a return of the show so you can sit on a couch with him and listen to him point out details like:
on Avril Lavigne "Complicated" - "If you want to know what real editing looks like, witness the moment at 00:03 where Avril skates up to her friends, stops on a dime, falls into a squatting position- presumably on her board- and gracefully manages to deliver her line. The editor deserves a Nobel Prize for bending the laws of physics to make it look like Avril knows how to skate."
or
on Hanson "If Only" - "[Director Dave] Meyers immediately confirms he’s behind the camera at :9 with his signature zoom-out transition that appeared in every video he ever directed. It looks like low-rent Matrix bullet time FX and I’m sure in 2000 it screamed “expensive.” It became a staple of early-00’s TRL videos, even ones Meyers didn’t direct"
So, while I don't think TRL is coming back — except when co-opted by Ariana Grande — maybe there's room for a sort of Beavis and Butthead, but with Isaac pointing out all that is genius and often overlooked in music videos. And, hey, I wouldn't mind playing Beavis in that duo.
Skylar Grey clearly knows that there's something not to be trusted about her boyfriend and their camping trip, while the camera and its attached light strains to illuminate that truth.