Mistaken for Strangers, the Documentary?

I was originally planning on writing about Tyler, The Creator’s newest music video for “IFHY,” especially since Kanye West shut down his whole website and just streamed Tyler’s video for Kanye felt it was so well done. However, I’ve come across news that personally excites me more and has potential to go ahead and be a giant music video of sorts.

It looks like The National will be releasing a documentary that follows their 2010 tour for their album High Violet. So instead of a long informational post today I’m going to post the trailer for this new documentary, Mistaken for Strangers, which is set to debut this Wednesday at the Tribeca Film Festival. I honestly can’t tell exactly what the film is about, but it will more than likely be host to a slew of The National’s best music, live tour action, and a little background to who The National really is. So get pumped!

Copying Art & Copy

Recently for class I watched a film called Art & Copy. It was a documentary describing the process of advertising and doing so successfully by looking at Mad Men that helped jumped start the business.  The movie also followed this man who puts up and takes down billboards for a living, which really added nothing to the film but I found it humorous that they decided to use this random man as a segue.

There was some inspiration to be found in the film however.  They interviewed George Lois who is an advertising genius and seemingly knows how to take smaller brands and turn them into a giant brand over night. He did this with Tommy Hilfiger by creating a fill in the blank word puzzle host to big names in the clothing industry such as Calvin Klein.  By putting the unknown name of Hilfiger next to 3 huge brands such as Klein and labeling them “The 4 Great American Designers For Men,” gave the line success almost over night.

This got me thinking about my current project with the Shafer Street Fugitive.  Having to promote this band in Athens will be a bit of a trick with their fan base being a tad smaller, so why not associate them with the bands that are already well known? I believe our group needs to take tactics where we book the band shows with bigger named bands on campus.  That way people going to see the bigger bands will see Shafer Street Fugitive not to mention their name will be next to bigger artists on posters around campus, which only makes it easier to associate SSF with the more well known acts.

Simple Can be Good

So I’ve recently come across the band Bombay Bicycle Club and I’ll be honest there is only one song I like by them, that being “Lights Out, Words Gone.” It just so happens that this song has a pretty grand music video to go along with it.

I love this based on two things.  Art direction and simplicity. 

The art direction goes hand in hand with the simplicity.  Each person was instructed to either wear a neutral white or black outfit, while characters of focus in the video were instructed to wear yellow, blue, or red, or at least one article of clothing hosting these colors. This creates nice complementary colors that poop throughout the video and help the eye focus.  They also stand strong against the light orange room used as the set of this video.

The simplicity of the video is really where this band succeeded though. The video has such a basic concept; get a room full of people doing a traditional dance. All this video is meant to show is people dancing to the music and enjoying themselves.  In fact, since this song is dropped over footage of some form of Latino dance gathering it almost appears any song could’ve been dropped in the background to make this footage coexist with the music.

Something else important to note is this song normally runs 5 minutes and 2 seconds and they made their music video only 3 minutes and 42 seconds.  This helps eliminate redundancy within a simple concept.  Good work Bombay Bicycle Club! Now make another song like this!