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Henry's Cat purruses the latest collection of the best and brightest new promo videos. The people at Mirrorball treat EIFF-goers to a collection of the best of new promotional shorts each year, from music videos to adverts, the bland to the innovative. As always, it's a mixed bunch. Offerings in the program include: artists from the retro synth stylings of Fischerspooner in full fetish gear to the guitar noodlings of Weezer, accompanied by Muppets. The styles vary wildly, from the ironic to the truly innovative, but would have difficulty being as diverse as the visuals. The most exciting of the videos is probably Kontaktschmelze, directed by Henrik Mauler. It's certainly the most different and interesting of the collection. Centering on a hypothetical Boolean camera and using ideas thus supplied to drive a post Designers Republic, cell shaded 3D animation of intersecting objects, graphically constrained by the AND, OR and NOT rules of Boolean mathematics, it does suffer slightly from a lack of musical impetus, although the visuals are interesting enough. Of the music videos, my favorite was Koichi Tsuhjikawa's Cornelius - Drop. Simple and aesthetically pleasing, it focuses upon a child washing his face in a bathroom. Shot at speed allows for high frame rate slow motion playback of water cascading into the basin, crystal clear, edited in perfect sync with the music, splashes corresponding to beats. Other impressive work: Traktor - Nike a man is chased around a French city by an angry chicken. Hilarious. Paul Gore and Sam Brown's Par T One A punk gig shot in low contrast black-and-white, nicely cut to fit the chopped up style of music. Paul Gore - DJ Shadow Impressive camerawork, as a street is shot iteratively. With each repeat, more detail is added, similar in feeling to some of Coldcut's promos from previous years. Simon & Jon's Northern Lite a fantastic idea transcribed to film nicely. A chase sequence, using die cast toy cars being finger rolled around a cardboard city. The rest are good, but less innovative than the above. The entry by Fischerspooner owes more to Marilyn Manson than the Eighties cliché it is aiming for and the Dom & Nic Chemical Brothers tape for The Test, featuring underwater girls swimming with CG whales, fails to impress. Another dissapointment is the Traktor video for The Prodigy, which, like their recent music, manages to emulate previous offerings without capturing the excitement; attempts at shock value are uninspired and obvious. Overall, this is a good collection of shorts, if a little hit-and-miss. Personally, I feel there should be less big named artists and more experiments into the obscure. |
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