Creatives Fred & Farid of BBH, London came up with the flesh-peeling roller-disco of Robbie Williams' "Rock DJ," and have gone on to even more grotesque visual metaphors for French rapper Doc Gyneco's "Caramel." Meanwhile, across town at Mother, Ben Mooge and Thomas Hilland crafted a promo for Norway's Royksopp.

Fred & Farid first worked with Williams on a Pepsi spot and "had a good feeling" with the British pop star. He asked them to script "Rock DJ." They built on Williams' rep as performer with a humorous and tricky edge, creating a video showing how true love demands total sacrifice.

"We are just screen writers for short films and we thought music videos are quite the same. Like how to find a very strong idea to imagine and write the most efficient short story. That's why music videos are a really obvious choice, apart from the fact we really like music," say the uni-voiced Fred & Farid. "It's the same problem as making the best commercial to be seen in the middle of a lot of commercials."

For their video for Doc Gyneco (a sort of hip hop Serge Gainsbourg), the creatives worked from the concept of "Caramel," a song concerned with the artist's mixed race birth. Fred & Farid focused on the birth aspect of the song. The video depicts a couple driving on a rainy night, en route to a hospital where the woman will give birth. Her water breaks while in the car and they are forced to stop and deliver the baby at the roadside. Their joy is doubles when a second child appears, but when their entire car is covered in afterbirth bedecked infants squirming and mewling, Gyneco (who plays the extremely fertile father delivering the plentiful infants) throws up his hands and leaves. It end with a shot of the baby-covered car and the super "Use Condoms."

"Doc Gyneco is obsessed with women and looks at them as divinity. The video is about women giving life, like a queen bee, a very old theme and subject, and the place of the man in this show of life," say Fred & Farid. "When she has to stop in the middle of the road she gives birth to not one, not two, not three but hundreds. It was done realistically. It could have been shocking but it's life. We didn't want it to be shocking. We wanted to make the most realistic treatment on this surrealistic scene."

Director Lars Blumers of Premiere Heure, Paris, (Markenfilm in Germany) shot the video, using latex puppets, simple dolls and CG to generate the brood. Combining DV and 35mm (with long lenses at close range) and working with one pregnant and one non-pregnant actress helped generate the sought after realism.

"There's always been the crossover in the other direction, things coming from music videos to commercials," says Blumers. "It's not bad to have really strong concept driven ideas in music videos. It's one direction to go, a specific form of music video, the concept video."

Hilland, an art director at Mother, comments on how he and fellow creative Mooge went to work on "Eple," their Royksopp video

"We heard these guys were coming out with their first record and we'd heard them live so it seemed like a good opportunity to get into music video production," says Hilland. Contact was made with the label Wall of Sound and Oslo-based production company Toxic came aboard to put together the video in After Effects.

"It was really like an open brief in a way. We do quite a lot of TV commercials so it's kind of the same medium. Also, it's like the whole kind of Mother philosophy; we are supposed to be open to do other stuff than advertising if it fits in," says Hilland. "The video's basically made up of still images within images, about 50 in total, all mixed up. It's a journey through these images, you just keep going round and round. Quite a lot of the images are from friends and family photo albums, parents and people when they were young."

Hilland and Mooge co-directed with Toxic, which gave them creative control not generally afforded on commercials. Fred & Farid are looking forward to directing their own concepts.

"With Robbie Williams it was the vision of [director] Vaughan Arnell and we would have preferred a more realistic treatment. We still have the ultimate idea," they say. "We are launching our own small production company for doing only music videos in London, called Fred & Farid. There is less money in music videos but we think that from an artistic point of view, it's great. Around November or December we will be ready. We will direct as much as we can, we like to work with cameras and to be really involved in the making of, not only the thinking about."