There are Rock Hall Of Famers like Bruce Springsteen, U2, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and Van Halen. Current hitmakers like Avril Lavigne, All-American Rejects, Jennifer Lopez, Damien Rice, Audioslave, Josh Groban and Macy Gray. And then there's Warrant. Meiert Avis has directed videos for them all, plus a whole lot more, over an impressive and still growing career.
name: Meiert Avis
company: Pusher
job/title: Director of music videos and commercials
First Video: My first video was for an Irish cult band called The Virgin Prunes. It was a long time ago. This was followed by a boat load of seminal U2 clips, peaking with the Grammy winning "Where The Streets Have No Name" video shot in downtown L.A. This video established U2 as the main contenders for "the next greatest rock band in the world," and didn't do my career any harm either. I have been making videos for musicians I love ever since.
My most recent clip is "Finally Made Me Happy" for Macy Gray's new album.
Strangest Video: I am an introverted person, so the whole directing process is strange for me. I remember going to meet Killing Joke after a gig in a bar somewhere in northern England to pitch them an idea for a video. Jaz got my treatment, hopped up on the bar and read my ideas to the whole bar in different character voices, to hoots of drunken laughter. I learned that videos should be entertaining. While I go into a shoot with a plan, I also enjoy that it's an inherently spontaneous medium, being performance based. You have to sculpt the uncertainty, work with the performers to spit lightning into a bottle.
What's Next: Right now it's a crazy time. The entire music distribution system is in play because of the internet. Music video is right at the front of all of this anarchy.
Everybody will get to be Andy Warhol.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers are the latest band to open the directing process to their fans.
I love this, everyone should be so lucky as to create and be heard. Maybe now they will have a competition to write the next Chili Peppers song, for free. Hopefully the concept that we all entertain each other for free, while legal snaps up the intellectual copyrights is a temporary aberration.
However, I am optimistic, short and long term. There is no other visual format where you get to create with so much freedom and at the same time reach a global audience.
Even with the current postage stamp online viewing windows videos have never been more relevant. Avril Lavigne's "Boyfriend" video has over three million hits on YouTube in three weeks and is their "most viewed" media this month. Avril is closely followed by the My Chemical Romance and Beyonce/Shakira clips. So, even though the business model is in flux and everyone is cutting budgets, videos are MORE important than ever and people want to watch them and talk about them more than ever.
Once the bandwidth issues have been worked out and we can watch videos, full screen, on-demand, there will be a huge renaissance in high budget music videos. Verizon has had fleets of guys out laying glass fiber all over the country. It will be mostly done by the end of the year. Then everything changes. One day everyone will be their own publisher.
So have some faith, and remember, as Anthony Kiedis paradoxically said in the context of the Peppers' fan video competition, "Videos are harder than they look. It's very, very rare and beautiful and monumental when someone makes a truly good video."
