It Was a Great Week for Music Videos

It Was a Great Week for Music Videos

The music video has been dead for decades. Since the premiere of the MTV’s The Real World, the video has died a slow death. But something happened last week.

A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera released “Say Something,” which follows three independent story lines.

Not your cup of tea? Maybe some Kanye West riding his motorcycle through the American West, complete with aerial photography of running horses? Or the Seth Rogen/James Franco parody?

Nah, we need something better. How’s this?

Bob Dylan’s people released a video for “Like a Rolling Stone” which features sixteen channels of people lip syncing to the tune.

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Maybe you even caught the cameo by photographer and PhotoShelter user David Walter Banks on the “Property Brothers” channel?

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And Pharell Williams released a video that lasts for 24 hours. Yes, 24 hours. His song “Happy” plays on loop and different people lip synch to the tune for 4 minutes each. I’ve watched about 3 hours of the video and it’s mesmerizing.

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And lastly, this amazing stop motion video of graffiti artists by Selina Miles.

Just when you thought the music video was dead, and interest had dwindled to nothing, we get a week like this. The Dylan and Pharell videos in particular have a strong interactive component to them that make them incredibly enticing. In each case, it made me ponder how photography might be jumped started on the web. Photos are so often curated to a very small set, and often run linearly. The are often small and subordinate. How might we re-envision the display of photography on the web to make photos a destination rather than an adjunct to something like a piece of text?

How can photos simultaneously inspire, inform and entertain merely through more creative presentation?

 

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This article was written by

Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder of PhotoShelter.

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