[Music Video Production] W2 Director in focus: Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham was the director we focused on in this week’s class. Most of the Cunningham’s videos adopted several special effects, and it is not hard to see they strongly rely on post-production techniques and/or some special settings. The play with the post-production and the settings are without a doubt the highlights of Chris Cunningham’s work.

Cunningham’s music videos- Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy and Window Licker are two of the most impressive music videos I have ever seen. The special effects are used in the video to build a sense of disturbance to attract attentions. The most noticeable features in both music videos are the morphing effect. The faces of the women and the dwarfs changed into Aphex Twin’s face. Th videos reminded me of a music video called Big Bad Wolf that I’ve seen before. Big Bad Wolf also plays around with human parts to create a sense of disturbance. The characters in the music video have human heads as their genitalia. Big Bad Wolf is quite similar with Come to Daddy and Window Licker in the sense that they all aim to create those bizarre and disturbing feelings. However, Big Bad Wolf uses a different kind of technique compare to those two videos. Cunningham’s videos use masks and makeups to achieve the effect whereas Big Bad Wolf must be done by making actors crouching in between the characters’ legs and then key out the actors’ bodies in the post-production. I believe these three videos are a great example to grab attentions as they achieve that by playing with you visuals and minds.

Last but not the least that I would like to mention is the video I like the most- Portishead’s Only You. The characters in the video were filmed in the water and then combined with street scenes in the post-production. I especially love the liquid-ish and pale effect on their bodies that caused by the water. The actors’ hair is floating in the air together with the sound and the beat of the song just make the style a bit more peculiar. The twist-around of the shoe laces was also a brilliant idea as well. At last, I was quite curious about how to they managed to do the lip syncing in such a environment. I would imagine it must be hard to lip sync under the water as it is physically impossible to hear anything in the water, but then we learnt that this sort of problem can be fixed during the post-production. Overall, I think this music video is very well made with those distinctive features and it certainly leaves me with a strong impression.

Lastly, the screening today truly opened up my eyes and made me realise how broad the music video world is. I’m glad that I had a chance to learn about the production of these amazing music videos and the special effects they used.