Music videos with a high 'How did they do that' factor?

[ianzin]

Lynne-42, yes, this thread can include adverts and any other short films /videos so long as they have a high ‘How did they do that?’ factor. The thread title doesn’t say so, but my OP does. I guess I was trying to make the thread title concise!

One very well-known advert from recent times is the Cog ad by Honda. This was based on a rather famous short (25 minute) film called The Way Things Go, made about 20 years ago. (Apparently Honda tend to either deny this connection or downplay it, but it remains my opinion that the ad was inspired by the film, and I don’t see how this can plausibly be denied.) When Cog first appeared, many people thought it must have been done using CGI, but we have good reason to believe it was all done for real, albeit it took hundreds and hundreds of takes to get it right.

Another recent ad that delighted fans of optical illusions and Escher was the Audi A6 TV commercial. This used a lot of elaborate digital tinkering to incorporate several notable illusions, mostly inspired by Escher, into the shots of the product cruising around the city. Very nicely done, with some very under-stated music that I think helped a lot.

The Sony Bravia ads also created a lot of ‘How did they do that’ commentary, the answer in this case being that they did exactly what it looks like they did… no special FX as such, just a lot of bouncing balls!

More recently, the Cadbury’s Gorilla ad caused a fair amount of buzz, with some people thinking it was a real gorilla, others insisting it must be a man in a suit, or CGI, or a combination of different methods.

This remarkable BBC promo video entitled ‘Rush Hour’ also created a storm of ‘how did they do that’ speculation here in the UK when it first began airing. Most found it hard to believe that the really big jump could have been done for real, without CGi or other digital trickery. At the time, the urban sport of ‘parkour’ was very little-known in the UK.

This beautiful Ariston advert doesn’t really pose the ‘how did they do that’ question, since it’s clearly a piece of digital animation. However, it is remarkably well done, and perhaps we can say it prompts the question, ‘How did they do that so well’.

Any more music videos, short films or ads that people want to bring to the party?

[CarnalK]

I saw this one video in the late 80’s and it had the lead singer giving himself a piggyback! I was baffled at first because there was no way video editing was that good at the time. It turned out it was the Proclaimers’ tune “I’m on my way” and those guys were twins. Ooops.

Everyone is linking to youtube but some of the visuals are seriously wasted with the definition you get. Has anyone tried stage6.divx.com? Here’s that White Stripes video with the Lego effects that NDP linked earlier: Fell in love with the girl (warning: requires divx webplayer plugin)
The bad part of divx is that it’s a bit of a resource pig and it’s still kinda “beta”.

[Maastricht]

For those who have become curious about Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth, herehere is a fragment. It is an example of the extreme close-ups in the series and how deep the camera got into an ants nest without disturbing what is going on there.

Anyone remember when fractals were new? I remember downloading one of those neat little programs that let you edit some variables in a mathematical equasion, and the result was a beautiful shape. Some of these programs yielded a fractal movie, like this one. It is a fractal, and the “camera” zooms in and in and in untill we see the same shape we started out with.

Or that George Michael videoclip with the 200 Michaels and Mary J Bliges manning the same club?

And for those who haven’t yet seen it: the morphed clipof five hundred years of female portraits.

[matt_mcl]

The one I thought of was Yesterday when I was mad by the Pet Shop Boys, and bear in mind it’s fourteen years old at this point.

[Swallowed_My_Cellphone]

@Quint

One more from Micheal Gondry (total freak visual genius)- Cibo Matto’s SugarWater.

The link didn’t work but I found another one. That’s quite clever.

[ianzin]

@Maastricht

Or that George Michael videoclip with the 200 Michaels and Mary J Bliges manning the same club?

Good call! I vaguely remember the first time this appeared. Even people with some awareness of what can be done with digital effects were impressed at the amazing, eye-popping effect achieved in the video, and at the amount of time that must have been involved in making it.

[pesch]

@ianzin

We’ve had several examples of ‘learn to mime the words backwards, shoot the whole video to reverse playback of the song, then reverse it’, but I would welcome more. I’m sure there are ‘better’ versions of this idea out there somewhere.

He doesn’t do it in the entire song, but Weird Al does this briefly in “Amish Paradise.” It’s pretty impressive-looking.

And thanks, all, for the tip about Gondry. I wondered why his name was familiar until someone mentioned “Eternal Sunshine.” What a fantastic movie!

[lynne-42]

@Maastricht

For those who have become curious about Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth, herehere is a fragment. It is an example of the extreme close-ups in the series and how deep the camera got into an ants nest without disturbing what is going on there.

Anyone remember when fractals were new? I remember downloading one of those neat little programs that let you edit some variables in a mathematical equasion, and the result was a beautiful shape.

I long for that sort of equipment so I can intrude on the life of my burrowing spiders. I just spent an hour photographing some of the web builders mating over the back door. It would have been much better to video.

As for fractals and Mandelbrot - this is one ‘how did they do that?’ I can answer fully - and have done that! Have fractals ever been used in music video clips?

[ianzin]

Lynne-42 - it seems very likely that fractals have been included in music videos or other short films, but so far I haven’t found any examples. There are some beautiful animations on YouTube and similar sites that show fractal geometric patterns and demonstrate that one can zoom into them indefinitely, but I haven’t seen this idea incorporated into anything else.

A related effect is known as the Droste Effect, which you can see here. It’s related in the sense that it presents a visual allegory for infinite regression. There are a number of short video clips and animations that feature this idea, although once again they are videos that exist solely to illustrate the effect, as opposed to integrating the effect into a music video, narrative or something else. The video that zooms into Escher’s ‘Print Gallery’ is especially satisfying and beguiling, I find, and I think it would have delighted Escher himself. The very centre of Print Gallery troubled him, because there really wasn’t any way to resolve it except to leave it as a misty, unfinished area in which he signed his initials.

I don’t know of any music video that incorporates the Droste Effect, although it’s well-known that the album sleeve for Ummagumma by Pink Floyd uses this idea. The video for Denial Twist by the White Stripes does incorporate the Droste Effect to some extent, if you watch it for long enough. But I’m sure there must be a better example of a vid or short movie that plays with the idea of ‘when you zoom in, you end up where you started’. If not, I’m sure Michel Gondry will get around to it eventually!

[Mangetout]

@lynne-42

This is really mind blowing. It has just created a long-term, highly ambitious plan to create an animated video of a fantasy quest! I have a garden I have designed and planted to be a strange world on a small doll’s scale. A dark forest of succulents, a desert and cliffs with towering rocks, and so on. It is nearly done now.

Until this moment, I had thought of it as the basis of still images to accompany a children’s book. I am an author by trade. There are parts in Dupree’s Paradise which look to me like the animation has been done in a real garden. My dolls encounter fantasy animals, such as gold crocodies and silver spiders, witches and dragons, all of which I have been collecting for ages. Now I want to animate them! Oh dear, what have you started?

Any more like this?

Probably not exactly what you’re looking for, but you might find them interesting, nonetheless - a curious blend of natural photography and animation:

samorost2.net

Samorost 1

[pinkfreud]

@lynne-42

I was just in the United States and saw a fleeting glimpse of an ad for a car, I think, with an ever growing number of singing animals as passengers. Can anyone point me to a clip of that?

That’s a commercial for the Jeep Liberty.

[lynne-42]

@pinkfreud

That’s a commercial for the Jeep Liberty.

Got it! Thank you. I love it.

[Mister_Rik]

@ianzin

The Ariston advert people borrowed or ripped off the idea (depending on your interpretation) to come up with the ad linked to below. This is the long version, but after its first run it was usually truncated to a 30 second version that sort of lost the point: Ariston advert

This was made in 1987, and was achieved using highly accurate digital rotoscoping. Still a lot of work, but a much easier and quicker process than the one Rybczynski used. The nice feature of this long version is that the camera pulls back to present a wider angle, which adds slightly to the complexity of the shot.

It looks like they used the same technique in Green Day’s [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVPbfwz1sBgRedundant video.

[lynne-42]

Now that I have had my brain fired up by all these incredible clips with the ‘how did they do that?’ factor, I have to ask the obvious question: How did they do that? The ‘making of’ vids are a good starting place, but I want to really understand at a more fundamental level. Assuming I have a reasonable education but am really limited in my knowledge of this field, how would you recommend I find out more?

[Mister_Rik]

@Little Nemo

An early classic of special effects musical numbers: Fred Astaire doing You’re All The World To Me from Royal Wedding (1951).

That must have been the inspiration for Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling. Fred’s version is better, though

From Japan: Robo Kiss by “W” - a whole bunch of Aibon and Nono.

And let me fix my Green Day Redundant link …

[SlickRoenick]

I don’t know the name of the song or the band, but the video was set at a big party or gathering or something. And every other person would become a 2D cardboard cut out that was carried away by someone else in the room. It was neat.

[Olive_The_Other_Reindeer]

[QUOTE=Phase42]
That must have been the inspiration for Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling. Fred’s version is better, though

Even better than that, they used the same stage and the same director (Stanley Donen)

Olive

[Maastricht]

Is this thread too old to resurrect? Because I HAD to add the recent video of Kate Bush King of the Mountain in which a white Elvis jumpsuit travels around the world (starting at 0.59 into the video) in search of happiness, exciting laundry whenever he goes.

[Hampshire]

I still love the VW Gene Kelly Singin in the Rain

This one just creeps me out Aphex Twin (wait for the children)

[BurnMeUp]

@Hampshire

This one just creeps me out Aphex Twin (wait for the children)

Damn you I was just coming to post that!