Music videos with cool special effects.

A great one from the 90s: Jamiroqui "Virtual Insanity"

 

No, they pulled a key on the highlights, did a soft clip, and also a mild blur/defocus. Very interesting process (aided by extraordinarily-good lighting). The first time I used it heavily was on the vampires in Queen of the Damned in 2002, and it was very, very hard to control since I had humans walking in front of the vampires and vampires walking in front of humans, and the humans always had to look normal but the vampires always had to look "glow-y." Now, we can do that a lot easier.

 

It has since been (far) surpassed, but I've always thought that "Coming Up", with its plethora of McCartneys, was a great video (and pretty cutting edge for its time).

Seeing it for the first time on Saturday Night Live is still a vivid memory. (The SNL DVD set might now be the only place to find the film in its original 4:3 aspect ratio.)

Other ones I've liked over the years:

– "Livin' on the Edge" (Aerosmith). The green Steven Tyler emerging from his own body, and Joe Perry nearly getting hit by a train were decent effects for 1993.
– "Otherside" (Red Hot Chili Peppers). I like most of the RHCPs' videos, but this one has a whole Dr. Caligari vibe going on. Pretty spooky.
– "I Wish U Heaven" (Prince). Lots of stuff happening on screen – usually to the beat of the song. The background continues moving right to left throughout the entire video. Nothing cutting edge for 1988/1989, but the imagery for the song is nice.

 

Oh, that wasn't an effect. They just told Joe to stand over there and the poor dope just did what he was told. It's a small miracle he stepped away when he did, really. It almost got kind messy.

 

You know, most people would not be so ready to admit they had anything to do with that movie. Brave man.

It's a shining example of how to take two pretty good and engaging books and turn them into one terrible, confusing mess of a movie. "Hey, our rights to this property are about to expire! Guess we'd better rush something into production!".

 

Yeah, that's the first one that came to mind...

 

It was an effect. Director Marty Callner was known for using all kinds of VFX in all his music videos -- he was very sophisticated technically and knew how to achieve some pretty sophisticated results quickly and economically. The trick with music videos is they'd have to shoot the sequence over and over again, and you can't tie up an entire train for (say) 20 takes. They could get a couple of takes with the train, then do 19 more with just the guy on the tracks and do a composite/split-screen to make it seem like they're both there at the same time.

Note the shot at 2:38: it's green screen, shot in a studio (exterior lighting doesn't match an interior stage). 2:47 is also a lock-down composite, albeit a very good one, shot well.



It is a really good video, and there's tons of VFX all the way through it, all done in the very early days of digital video back in 1993. I think Post Group did all the work on it.

I made a ton of dough off Queen of the Damned, and the people were very nice. Often the case with these projects: the great movies have horrible people, and the horrible movies have really nice people.

 

Those shots look more like Introvision than chroma key.

 

Mentioned a few posts up, this is the video for "Otherside" by Red Hot Chili Peppers:

(I liked Anthony when he still had his long hair, but the short 'do he had in the videos from Californication suited him too! )

 

Here's "I Wish U Heaven" by Prince.

Not a hit, but one of my faves from Lovesexy.

 

Had no idea Fincher directed that. Always loved that video.

dan c

 

Haven't seen that in years. Looks reeeeeealy expensive, production holds up (other than being stuck in standard def forever). They even wrecked a (then) new Lincoln. The labels were flush with cash from all those CD sales, the good times were never gonna end!

dan c

 

Hey ya - still great!

 

Another good one

 

I remember most of my music videos dried up around 1992/1993. I ran into the longtime producer I had worked with and said, "hey! Haven't seen you guys in awhile!" And he shrugged and said, "the record labels cut our budgets down from $75,000 to $50,000 and now $20,000 per video, so it's just not profitable to shoot them any more." So that's what happened back then. There was about a 10-year-period where they were huge... lots and lots of $100,000-$200,000 videos. And heavy special effects were the norm.

Could possibly be. It's definitely a composite, whether it's green screen or something like Introvision (the half-silver mirrored real-time composite). I visited Introvision when they were there right off Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood in 1989 on the Sylvester Stallone movie Lock-Up, since they used that VFX system for some shots in the film. Stallone is not a tall man.

Digital effects pretty much killed all "analog" film composites and real-time systems like Introvision. Out with the old, in with the new.

 

There was a time when you could turn on MTV or even VH-1 and you were almost always guaranteed to see a music video with interesting special effects within about 15 minutes.

 

One of my fave gimmick videos - "Typical" by obscure indie rockers Mutemath. It has fun with the impossible physics afforded by being run in reverse.

 

Or, as it's known to the rest of the pop-lite world: the tail-end of Michael Jackson's "Black or White".

 

I'm so enamoured by Moloko's "Forever More". Roisin is riveting all my her own bad self, but the dance crew all coming from behind her is a great, simple gimmik. And then, there's that whole awesome, "Walking-Dead-meets-drunk-dubstep" vibe.
Just can't watch it only once.

 

The White Stripes - Hardest Button to Button by Michel Gondry

 

I don't know why I forgot this one, but this Michael Jackson video won a ton of awards and I believe cost a whopping $7 million dollars at the time, a lot of which went towards the exotic visual effects:

 

I was also knocked out by the music video to Sia's "Cheap Thrills," which I thought perfectly replicated the look of 1962 American Bandstand (or something like it). The amount of effort they went to add the distortion and look of vintage tube TV cameras was remarkable -- there's all kinds of "bending" in the picture and flare and crap. Really remarkable job. You could almost put this on the air in 1962 and freak everybody out.