The music video fantasy falls apart on purpose in this revealing clip where Josef Salvat and director Ollie Wolf point out and send-up all the stock elements you'd usually see in somethingmlike this.
A game of hide-and-seek with George Ezra filmed over two days at Cornwall, UK's lush Eden Project eco-attraction. Riff Raff’s Ben Reed has created a beautifully simple and subtle video for George Ezra’s latest track “Barcelona”.
Ben Reed, director: "We wanted to make something that was as soothing and sweet on the eyes as the song is to the ears. An effortless video that just drew you in. I'd been playing a lot of Where's Wally online and watching old David Attenborough episodes and thinking about the time that Coppola directed a movie from a jacuzzi. So we photographed him singing from hundreds of metres away on a giant zoom lens in the tropical environs of the Eden project. We were going to dress him as various plants and hide him, but it felt too outlandish, so we made him fly instead, because everyone should."
The story here is that Lorde had a dream a few months back about teens in charge of their own world, dealing with, in her own words via Facebook, "tests that didn't need to be passed in order to be allowed in: sometimes the person who loses is stronger." So, no Lord Of The Flies violence here; just the current young ruler of music running things her own way: no bling, no product placement [ed: Sorry, Hyundai], no frills. Yeezus' heiress apparent, she is not.
Placebo "Too Many Friends" is one of those great videos that can be easily summed-up in a couple bullet-points to a newbie — it's narrated by author Bret Easton Ellis and ends with a quiz — but also stands up to repeated viewings and close studies. The video is a mystery, but also a critique about how we've been lulled into submission by our digital devices and the well-chose pharmaceutical.
We recently chatted with director Saman Kesh via email about how the video came together, the irony of it all, and what it means — including how the video is slyly, if a bit coincidentally connected to The Dark Knight Rises.
Narrator Bret Easton Ellis — yes, the dude who wrote Less Than Zero — and director Saman Kesh (aka Saman Keshavarz) explore the anatomy of a seemingly simple scene that reveals itself to be far more complex upon closer inspection. But the moral here isn't the unreliability of perception; it's the danger of relying on technology and drugs that actually amplify, instead of serving our desires and fears.
I'll let you make up your own "hairy" pun for this video, so long as it means you'll watch it. Because it is awesome, whether you're way into beards, or not.
If this gem from the Riff Raff production company isn't in contention for every Best Hair award next year, there is something wrong.
Just when you think this video can be easily summed up as "Darwin Deez photobombs a series of cheesy commercial shots," director Keith Schofield takes it to someplace much less simple. The basic structure doesn't change, but it turns out that lonely Darwin is alternately exploding in rage and mourning each phase of love that he'll miss out on as a single dude. Not to give away any spoilers in this fantastically lunatic clip, but he doesn't seem to get lucky in the end, although he does get his aggression out. And that manatee does look pretty cute.
