Another popular style of music video is using animation techniques Some use cartoon animation, some use stop motion animation and others use digital animation. Sometimes the artist is represented performing in animated form and other times there is a narrative featured using animation.
My students and I are looking at different style of music videos and we have already looked at a couple of different music genres, and as-live or in concert music videos so far.
Animated music videos can often be very
eye-catching and allow the impossible to be achieved. Cartoon animation can
range from the simplistic child-like drawings of the music video for Nizlopi’s
JCB song to the anime style of Linkin
Park’s Breaking The
Habit. If the artist is performing in animated style, then lip synching can
still be included. In the case of the Linkin Park
music video, this was achieved by filming the band’s performance and then rotoscoping
it. This is where animators use the real footage as the basis for their
animation. Take on Me famously mixed live action with cartoon animation.
Stop motion animated music videos are still
very popular despite the increase of digital animation. They allow very
imaginative ideas to be brought to life. Stop motion is the process of taking
many still images and putting them together to create the impression of a
moving image. It can make lip synching difficult but many stop motion music
videos have achieved it. Plan B’s video for No Good took seven days to shoot on a stills
camera and is particularly creative for its use of lip synching. This ‘was achieved by
Levi shooting Plan B performing the track on a DV camera, then output the
footage at 12 frames per second and printed a book of all 2,800 frames, which
became their lip-synch bible. “Every frame we shot we showed him the relevant
page of the book and he mimicked the shape of his mouth on that page for the
shot,” says Daniel.’’’ (www.britishcouncil.org/antenna_uk_transcript_english.doc)
Other examples include Oren Levi and Her Morning
Elegance, early example Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel and Coldplay’s Strawberry
Swing.
Finally digital animation is the most
recent form of animation to be used in music videos. It is the same principal
as other forms of animation with fluid motion being created frame by frame but
now on computers. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers use digital animation for their
video for Californication to make it look like a video game.
As always there are many more examples out
there and I would be very grateful if anyone could point me in the direction of
any better examples of animated videos and perhaps I can add them to this post.
More in this series on the styles, conventions and techniques of music videos:
More in this series on the styles, conventions and techniques of music videos:
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