It's hard to imagine a director better suited to direct a video for The Fray's "How To Save A Life" than Mark Pellington. Having endured the tragedy of losing his wife to a sudden illness, Pellington lays out the steps from an imaginary recovery primer over portraiture shots of the band and various children emoting for the camera. In terms of impact and pure artfulness, it's probably the director's best work since his breakthrough clip for Pearl Jam's "Jeremy."
Director Frank Borin is a smart man. He knows exactly where your attention is drawn when a naked woman is on-screen and that is where he places footage of singer/songwriter Rocco DeLuca. It's a simple, yet effective conceit that — to paraphrase the lyrics — may indeed the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.
The evil geniuses over at Artificial Army use this twisted video for These Arms Are Snakes to imagine that My Little Pony ain't so little and ain't so innocent no more. The pink "Horse Girl" is lured into a life of sin and debasement in the shadowy netherworld of Hollywood. Easy money gained from "pony rides with happy endings" leads her to a pill spewing anus (or orange?) that
eventually turns her into a demonic creature.
Two former and/or future lovers go about their almost synchronous lives in this artful and rather beautiful split-screen video for The Album Leaf. The two walk the same streets, visit the same bars and even read the same authors — Haruki Murakami, literature's current master of all that is offbeat, was a wise choice. "Always For You" also reaps dividends thanks to shooting in the band's San Diego hometown. Besides using their actual practice space as the performance location, the video also includes numerous well-known landmarks and hangouts — including The Turf Club, which is the city's, if not the country's finest grill-your-own-food bar.
Considering that anything Sean Lennon creates is immediately compared with the work of his father John Lennon — aka one of the greatest songwriters and most famous figures of all time — it's not surprising that eight years have passed since his debut album, Into The Sun. His new release, Friendly Fire, finds him in a distinctly different head space than what permeated Into The Sun.
Director Dale Resteghini tells the tale of what happens when you take a NYC rap star like Jim Jones to the West Coast for "We Fly High/Reppin' Time," a larger than life video that boasts the kind of plot you'd read about in an Elmore Leonard crime novel.
Imagine it's your first video. You're shooting in the area around the notorious Salton Sea in Southern California. It's July. It's so hot that the cameras have to be placed in a cooler every two minutes just to keep them working.
That's the situation described by photographer/director Brantley Gutierrez in this commentary for the IV Thieves — a group with a story as interesting as the video. If embedded player does not appear, visit YouTube
Director Joseph Kahn shares some thoughts on his epic music video "Knights Of Cydonia" for the English band Muse. Kahn takes the classic template of the Spaghetti Western and laces it with humor, kung fu and lots of sci-fi elements to create a video that's every bit as creative and wonderfully absurd as this operatic rock tune.
Being that Rinocerose are really two psychiatrists who double as recording artists, it makes sense that they don't appear in this video, or in the Apple iPod commercial that made this song absolutely unavoidable. Directing team Alex And Liane fill us in how they got connected with the band and the dance troupe that appear in the video.
Rock critic Simon Reynolds sums up the credo of post-punk with the title of his recent book about the early years of the genre, Rip It Up And Start Again. That sentiment literally informs this Aberdeen City video, which looks to be constructed of moving images ripped out of various magazines, photographs and posters. Adam Neustadter — who co-directed the video with Pete McCoubrey under the Wormseye banner — takes us in depth on Aberdeen City's "God Is Going To Get Sick Of Me":
Do you think Hollywood is nothing more than a two-dimensional sham of what's supposed to be glamorous? Well, in this video for Stone Sour's "Through Glass," that's exactly what it is: Fake. The beauty, the wealth — It's all just flat, cardboard cutouts.
Director Tony Petrossian takes us in depth with this exclusive commentary version of the video. Be sure to stay tuned to catch a special bonus ending that shows exactly how they pulled off a classic "How'd they do that?" effect.
