Some One Knows What They're Doing

So this year of Music Videos was off to a weird start.
Meaning, there wern't any. Like at all. Until a week later.

Then the public received, "SouljaBoy Tell Em'" and "Freeze" the latest Auto-Tuner installment from T-Pain featuring the Dacing Feet of Chris Brown and the lack of him singing anything really. He sang, like, a sentence and then he was gone. Probably off to abuse his fame in order to get some red of LA Cooze.

Anyway.

Now some artsy music videos are starting to show their faces which means that you should color me excited. I am a big fan of treating music videos as an art so I'm really excited to show you guys this.

This video is directed by Yuval and Merav Nathan. I guess their Israeli brothers who've gotten into music videos. At least that's what I think their back story is.

So, as it turns out, they started out as animators doing 3-D cartoons and all that bidness then they were seens by somebody and one thing lead to another and you can watch all of their videos on their website here.

So it seems that in the Oren Lavie music video they stuck to their style of stop motion with people. Which, I've had different feelings about over the years. I mean, I know it can look cool but I think the only time it's acceptable to use Stop-Motion with the living is in cases like this music video. Where the directors had something extraordinary planned but their budget is maybe $20. And then I could get into how I feel you should only use stop motion when the mood calls for it and if the mood calls for it then you're probably doing an indie movie.

I can say after watching all of their videos that the Oren Lavie music video is the best by far. Yuval & Merav Nathan have made maybe another really good music video with their stop-motion method but everything else they make is more klunky than cute and I have the idea that's not what they were going for.

This music video knows it's strengths and weaknesses. The main weakness of using stop motion with Lip-Syncing is that the entire movement of the mouth isn't really photographed but maybe 50-75% depending on the length of the word and when a view sees that this it kinda takes them out of the surreal world of whimsy and cute images. So how do they fix this. They keep the guy who is lip-syncing away from the camera. This way you can barely see what he's doing but you have the general idea.

The song is also well written and goes with the mood of the piece. The video is also directed by the singer Oren Lavie but I think it's co-directed in the nicest sense of the word. Like, maybe he had the idea to keep the whole thing on a bed instead of an actual sidewalk. I dunno. But it seems that the direction was able to mesh very well with the attitude given by the music and whenever this is attempted it doesn't always work so props to them.

And finally, I give final props for using clothes in your every day drawer as animals and set pieces. Not everyone would have thought of that and because of their imagination I can't wait to see what Merav Nathan and Yurav come up with next.