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Scene Not Herd: MUSIC VIDEOS
Scene Not Herd is back for its sixth year! Our annual cavalcade of music video madness is sure to delight and amaze fans of cutting edge visuals and amazing new music alike. As a special bonus, we're including a collection of N.A.S.A. videos, curated and in many cases co-directed by legendary Los Angeles animator Syd Garon.
ROM | FRIDAY, JUNE 19 | 9:30 PM | 90 MINUTES
| N.A.S.A.: Money |
| This politicized promo animates the graphic symbolism propagated by Los Angeles artist Shepard Fairey. Perhaps best known for his 2008 Obama "Hope" graphic, MONEY explores Fairey's more subversive roots, painting a portrait of humanity's penchant for greed and subjugation by the all-seeing, all-powerful illuminati. |
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| THUNDERHEIST: Jerk It |
| A stylish girl dressed for action. A male chicken. A repetitive jerking motion. Sharp editing and cinematography allow this simplistic clip to transcend the puerile visual pun around which it's based. |
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| MIMS: Move (If You Wanna) |
| The most mainstream work to-date from the up-and-coming Keith Schofield, this straightforward video layers Mims' smooth, curb-side performance with a selection of variable-speed background dancers. Mims and his crew flow and pop back and forth in a mechanically tight visual representation of the track's tempo tampering tendencies. |
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| N.A.S.A.: Hip Hop |
| Fat Lip and KRS-One beg for a dose of old school hip hop and manage to avoid sounding like grumpy old rappers, thanks to the mysterious animator/illustrator Splunny. The whole escapade is framed as an underground newscast littered with freaky yet crudely appealing characters. |
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| THE BUDDY SYSTEM: Horse Mountain |
| A pair of youngsters goes horseback riding across an oddly-coloured landscape and takes the fork in the trail marked with a skull. Soon enough, they can?t turn back and find themselves in a fortress ruled by malevolent and quite possibly demonic horses. It's man vs. equine in a battle for survival. |
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| MY MORNING JACKET: Touch Me I Am Going To Scream Part 2 |
| Set deep in a verdant jungle on a dark night, this video stars a furry, timid creature with gigantic eyes and draws from an array of inspirations, such as the BBC's PLANET EARTH, foliage plucked from the streets of New York City, and the work of Russian animator Yuri Norstein. |
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| R.E.M.: Hollow Man |
| On the surface, life in the digitally-assisted, multi-screen, twenty-first century appears to be a rich tapestry of opportunities and entertainment. But is a life surrounded by barriers streaming a one-way tsunami of information down our throats anything more than a pixelized prison? We think not. |
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| BEAST: Mr. Hurricane |
| In what appears to be a recurring bee-obsession held by the band, this video has the Canadian duo rocking out in a ramshackle house swarming with bees. After initially struggling to maintain humanoid form, the man-swarm finds its composure and struts out into the world. |
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| N.A.S.A.: Way Down |
| A washed-out water colour version of the sun-bleached Southern California landscape is the setting for a seemingly sweet romance between a Cardinal and a Blue Jay. We quickly learn the colour of the birds is a reference to the infamous rival gangs born out of Los Angeles: the Crips and the Bloods. Avian violence ensues. |
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| REX THE DOG: Bubblicious |
| To call this a handcrafted music video would be an understatement. Using stop motion animation, we see the creator's hands wielding an X-Acto knife to cut plentiful foam core board into the stage, set, players, and the video's protagonist. In keeping with their visual tradition, the band and their audience consist of cute foam pups. |
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| BLAMMA! BLAMMA!: Collide Sparks |
| London's Bearfight Studios makes use of the cutting edge, 1000 frame per second slow motion capabilities of the Phantom HD High Speed Cam to capture the collision of antiques hurled at one another, intercut with a pair of great big fat fellows charging, in all their rippling glory, towards a sumo-like confrontation. |
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| N.A.S.A.: A Volta |
| Logan crafts an intricate and dark urban hellscape inhabited by an array of seedy characters, animated with a distinctly hand wrought look and feel. Cut to the glass-powdered vocals of Sizzla and Amanda Blank, the CG camera jumps from street slashings to alleyway misery with jarring, jaunty aplomb. |
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| ROYKSOPP: Happy Up Here |
| Buildings and advertisements of our urbanized, consumer society are reframed as a light-dappled and slogan-centric dreamland. That is until lights pull away from their signs and reform into the Earth-hating aliens of the classic arcade game, Space Invaders. Luckily there's an anti-alien sub-compact armed with a roof cannon patrolling the lonely streets... |
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| N.A.S.A.: The People Tree |
| The first of two videos featuring work by Canadian artist and illustrator Marcel Dzama. The Winnipeg native's trademark masked figures, elemental spirits and chimera creatures spring to surreal life, aligning perfectly with the lyrics to question the supposed line between humanity and the animals we so readily cull. |
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| DEPARTMENT OF EAGLES: No one Does it Like You |
| Patrick Daughters of world-renowned Los Angeles production firm The Director's Bureau teams up with Marcel Dzama to create a startlingly resonant live-action version of Dzama's illustrative style while delivering a harrowing narrative on a bloody modern conflict between two faceless battalions of soldiers. |
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| ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: My Girls |
| Given the psychedelic space surf for which the Animal Collective are known, the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test treatment applied to this simplistic clip makes perfect sense. Sure there is some performance in here, but the fact that blacked-out band members are laced with hyperspace effects playing in front of a Pink Floyd light show makes it all worthwhile. |
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| FLEET FOXES: Mykonos |
| Constructed from angular, distinctly handmade paper forms and silhouettes, MYKONOS is an emotional journey from a wild birth in a primal wilderness to the depths of a remote, mystical palace, and eventually, a watery grave. Simple forms are brought to flowing life via painstakingly-constructed stop motion craftsmanship. |
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| SLIIMY: Wake Up |
| Nerdy, singsong Parisian pop singer Sliimy can't help but evoke a happy-go-lucky vibe. Simply coloured backdrops and a plethora of multi-coloured clay effects and props are inserted in and around his performance, which is really anything but slimy. |
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| BLOC PARTY: Signs (Armand Van Helden Remix) |
| Emotions evoked by good ol' Bloc Party are tempered with Van Helden's club-ready beats. Director Hiro Murai draws on this synthesis to mix human forms with mechanical shapes drawn from the aesthetic of sound systems and discos. And there's a vocal performance directly influenced by the work of Sharon Stone. Wait for it. |
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| N.A.S.A.: Gifted |
| Long distance space travel can be a bitch, especially when you and your copilot are traveling through an uncharted system far from the nearest inhabited colony. Just imagine what might happen if you crashed, forced to wander a barren planet with no hope of rescue. If only there was some way to train for such a situation. |
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