Director Michel Gondry brought together punk rock, Lego and stop motion animation in a new video for the White Stripes. He also created another visually synchronized video for The Chemical Brothers' "Star Guitar."
The White Stripes "Fell in Love With a Girl" begins with Gondry's son Paul building a Lego countdown, then descends into a stop-motion romp, with Lego/pixelized versions of the Stripes duo rocking through performances, swimming scenes and striking block visuals to the less than two-minute long track. (To view the White Stripes video please visit http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/musicvideos).
"The video was shot on a Bolex with real Lego pieces. First I shot the basic rock video with a little video camera, just getting the band on blue screen, walking around and jumping in water and swimming," says Gondry.
In the edit suite, Gondry had the negs treated with a program that would, when prints were produced at low resolution, lend Lego-like shapes to enlarged pixels. Each frame was then printed out at large size on paper. Gondry and a team of punk rock Lego animators then assembled each frame from Lego and shot it with a 16mm Bolex camera. Various crisper scenes, such as close-ups of the band members' faces were built with twice as many Lego blocks to provide high resolution.
"The White Stripes music is so basic - drum, guitars and voice - so I thought using three primary colors worked. I thought the crudeness of Lego would represent them well," says Gondry.
"I guess even when you get to be more famous and have more money, you can stay with less pretentious concepts and go for the handmade look. I went to a Cure concert in maybe 1981, and before they started to play they showed an animated piece that was excruciatingly boring, moving slowly and with slow music. Animation for punk should be handmade."
As for "Star Guitar," Gondry worked again with the Chemical Brothers, for whom he directed "Let Forever Be." The 4/4 time layered techno track, has its various sounds and segments represented by different landscape elements seen from a train window as it passes through rural and urban France; each element is positioned exactly in synch with the music and as the song becomes more elaborate, so to does the landscape and passing rail traffic. The details are picture perfect with a reflection in the train window further heightening the realism of the promo.
"I was on a train trip with my girlfriend and I had shot some video and played this track and it went so well together. The idea is of a journey, escaping something and always moving was in the track. The beat is strong and each element corresponds to a different note in the song," says Gondry.
About 20 hours of footage was shot on DV, with Gondry bending his mind to finding landscape that matched the song and insuring lighting remained more or less constant. Then, working with his brother Olivier's Twisted Laboratories, the elements were synchronized, scenes were cleaned up and transitions were perfected in a process that took roughly two months. At the end of the video, when the train passes through a town, individually computer generated people are also used to represent different notes.
"The idea was to use the visuals to build musical partitions with a very banal landscape and a train. In some ways it was similar to Daft Punk "Around The World," where the partition was with the choreography. This time it was only the landscape," explains Gondry.
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•BOARDS ADVERTISING WOMEN OF EXCELLENCE CALL FOR NOMINEES> Advertising's Women of Excellence are leaders who have made significant creative and business contributions in the international advertising and commercial production communities. These creatively distinguished, inspirational leaders will be profiled in the October issue of Boards Magazine. You have until Sept. 8 to nominate your choice for Advertising Women of Excellence in three categories. For complete details, click here. •CSI CREATOR ANTHONY ZUIKER TO KEYNOTE BOARDS CREATIVE WORKSHOP IN LA> Save the date - Sept. 18 - as it marks the first appearance of the inspiration-packed Boards Creative Workshop series in Los Angeles. Among the highlights will be a keynote presentation from Anthony Zuiker, creator and executive producer of the hugely popular CSI franchise, who will explain how to effectively create a brand experience through cross-platform storytelling. Sponsored by Human, Wiredrive, Raleigh Film Studios and Digit, the LA edition of the popular BCW series will touch down at the gorgeous Freud Playhouse at UCLA. The half-day event, chaired by Deutsch LA president & CCO Eric Hirshberg, promises an afternoon of insight and illumination into the state of creativity today. Click here for more info. •GOOGLE LAUNCHES WEB BROWSER> Google has unveiled a new, open-source web browser called Google Chrome via the company blog on Monday, taking aim at Microsoft's market-dominating Internet Exlporer. Google is billing Chrome as a "modern platform for web pages and applications" with a clean interface and ability to streamline multiple processes at once using a new JavaScript engine. A beta version of the browser for Windows was made available in 100 countries today. Versions for Mac and Linux are in the works as well. For a full explanation of Chrome's inner workings, check out Google's Chrome comic. •HONEYSHED HIRES A CEO, PREPS LAUNCH> After one year of
Beta testing, independent agency droga5 will officially launch its
hybrid branded entertainment-shopping-social networking website
HoneyShed.com on November 1 under the leadership of newly-hired CEO
Stephen Greifer, formerly SVP/global lead of Digitas' promotions
practice. The site, which is a joint venture between droga5, Publicis,
and commercial production company Smuggler, will be completely
overhauled and bolstered by a multi-million dollar marketing campaign
come November. According to a statement, Greifer has assembled a team
from Digitas and Denuo behind the launch to evolve the site, drive
audience demand and attract advertisers. •BOARDS' BUZZ-WORDLE AVAILABLE FOR YOUR DOWNLOADING PLEASURE> A few weeks back we appealed to various adland luminaries to send us their most loved and hated buzzwords in order to create our own Wordle - a free web tool that generates "word clouds" based on text or an RSS feed. Developed by IBM senior software engineer Jonathan Feinberg, Wordle is covered by a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can make a Wordle, and reproduce it. Not only have we succeeded in reproducing an insufferable miasma of adspeak, we've made it available for you, dear readers, to download as authentically organic desktop wallpaper. Heck, maybe it'll "go viral". Err... to download your very own Buzz-Wordle, click here and to read four fun buzz definitions, click here. •BEHIND THE SCENES IN QUEENS> Whenever you hear a car stereo booming through your neighborhood, with its subwoofer "woofing" and volume presumably set on This Is Spinal Tap's mythical "11", it's a safe bet that the driver isn't trying to call attention to his love for Euro house but is instead showing off his wheels. So what commentary are the Trinidadian-born, New York-based teenagers in directing collective Randall Stevens USA's new short doc, Made in Queens, making when they strap entire stereo systems onto ordinary bicycles? To find out, click here. •JPC, SAG AND AFTRA AGREE TO EXTEND COMMERCIALS CONTRACT> After weeks of speculation, the news was made official today (Aug. 27) - the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the advertising industry’s ANA/AAAA Joint Policy Committee on Broadcast Talent Union Relations (JPC) have jointly announced a six-month extension of the current commercials contract. This extension, which lasts to March 31, 2009, adds six months to the previous two-year extension agreed to by all parties, which would've expired on Oct. 29, 2008. •EUROBEST JURY PRESIDENTS ANNOUNCED> Organizers of the
21st Eurobest Awards have revealed the names of this year's five jury
presidents. Mother, London founding partner and joint creative director
Mark Waites will head the TV/cinema, print, outdoor and radio jury;
Farfar, Stockholm creative president Matias Palm-Jensen will head the
integrated jury; Team Creatif, France CEO Sylvia Vitale Rotta will head
the first-ever design jury; Mediaedge:cia chief executive EMEA Melanie
Varley will head the media jury and TBWA\Germany CCO Kurt Georg
Dieckert will head up the direct and promo jury. Entries are now open
and the winners will be announced on December 3. |
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