The itty bitty video
As the music industry landscape shifts, bands and record companies turn away from big-budget clips and toward simpler, Web-based fare
Two years ago Vincent Moon and a blogger friend were getting drunk at an Arcade Fire concert in Paris. At the end of the show, the band walked off the stage, through the crowd, and out onto the sidewalk - still playing their instruments. Moon followed, mind blown and future decided.
"It was so obvious to me," says Moon, a 28-year-old French filmmaker. "We had to create that, we had to put the bands back on our level. And right then I started to develop the first video, as simple as possible and very amateur, in the most beautiful sense of the word. One shot. One take. A unique moment."
Today Moon posts his free weekly video podcasts of artists performing in an urban Paris environment - Andrew Bird walking down the street, Elvis Perkins playing in the cosmetics section of a department store, the Arcade Fire squeezed into an elevator - on blogotheque.net. Emulated by filmmakers around the world, Moon's "Concerts a Emporter, also known as "The Take Away Shows," are emblematic of a new era in music videos.
It's an era of shrinking budgets and exploding technology, a time when once-dominant MTV has morphed into reality-show central and the Internet has turned the entire planet into content providers. Size matters when cellphones are viewing screens and labels are staring down bankruptcy and a grass-roots, interactive culture is burgeoning in the music marketplace.
Small, for so many reasons, is the new big.
That's not to say slick, elaborate videos have gone extinct. Earlier this month hip-hop star Missy Elliott released the first-ever 3-D video, for her new single, "Ching-a-Ling." The video for "Touch My Body," from pop diva Mariah Carey's forthcoming album, was helmed by action-film director Brett Ratner. For shameless sprawl and sheer buzz, look no further than R&B singer R. Kelly's satirical, 22-chapter soap opera "Trapped in the Closet," released periodically between 2005 and 2007.
But the blockbusters are few and far between, the landscape is shifting fast, and MTV - whose slashing of its music-video programming was in direct response to declining viewership - is scrambling to stay relevant as an on-demand Web presence.
"We're making content more findable and adding features like social tools and lyrics," says Courtney Holt, executive vice president of digital music and media at MTV Networks. "We typically don't get the credit, but we've done over 1.2 billion video streams across the network [which includes VH1.com and CMT.com]. There are lots of choices, but we offer a very competitive choice."
But not a particularly innovative choice. Current TV, a two-year-old cable television network and website, is a new-model community where the wall between artist and audience begins to break down: 30 percent of Current's programming is viewer-generated. That philosophy of engagement, not to mention the prospect of a no-budget video shoot, attracted high-profile indie bands such as the Shins and My Morning Jacket. They're the flagship artists in Current's "All Eyes On" series, a collaborative video project that exclusively uses raw footage from audience members' cellphones and digital cameras to create concert videos.
"It was never our design to show music videos," says Deanna Cohen, Current's vice president of music programming. "We seek a conversation."
A portion of every uploaded clip is used in the "All Eyes On" videos, empowering both a contemporary fan base that relishes interactivity and an underfunded label system forced to tighten its belt. Current's mission also appeals to mavericks like Radiohead, which chose to broadcast its New Year's Eve performance of "In Rainbows" on the fledgling network even though Current boasts less than half the viewership of MTV.
Dave Meyers, the director of Elliott's "Ching-a-Ling," has witnessed firsthand the dramatic downsizing in his business. In 2002 he was averaging 45 projects a year; in one week alone that year he had three million-dollar videos in heavy rotation on MTV - Britney Spears's "Boys," Celine Dion's "A New Day Will Come," and Shakira's "Objection." Now he makes five videos a year and pays the bills by directing commercials.
"The minimum budget I'm capable of working with, $300,000 to $400,000, is now the maximum labels are willing to spend," says Meyers. "Five years ago Missy's label would have greenlighted a million-dollar price tag without a blink, but when we rolled in with that number, they lost their minds. Her manager worked out a wonderfully complex collaboration between Atlantic Records and
Happily, the aesthetics of new media, and to a certain extent the artists and fans drawn to the cutting edge, don't conflate big bucks with creative achievement. Michael Stipe is a Vincent Moon fan, and R.E.M. has hitched its wagon to the creator of "The Take Away Shows" (which have become so popular that Moon is designing a new website to feature the work of like-minded video directors).
R.E.M., which in the past has created elaborate video set pieces, has begun the countdown to its new album, "Accelerate," by posting a brief, Moon-shot video clip at ninetynights.com each day for three months leading up to the April 1 release. In addition to watching the impressionistic narrative unfold, fans are welcome to download, remix, mash up, and otherwise use the footage as they choose. Moon also created the video - or rather 12 signature, guerrilla-style videos shot in New York City - for "Supernatural Superserious," R.E.M.'s first single, and posted at supernaturalsuperserious.com. Again, fans will be able to mix their own video using footage from the dozen different feeds.
"People are figuring out that there are a lot of different ways to make a film that doesn't cost a lot of money, and we need to do that now," says Bertis Downs, R.E.M.'s manager. "You can't do everything, so you try to keep everything focused on important things. Interactivity is essential. It's what you do."
Ten years ago having a video in rotation on MTV was one of three key components to successfully launching an album, or an artist. (For the record, the other historical pillars of success - a radio single and mainstream press - are essentially irrelevant as well.) Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles was a virtual unknown last May when an audience member shot a brief video clip of her performance in a nightclub and uploaded it to YouTube. It spread, and so did her reputation. Bareilles's first album, "Little Voice," was released two months later, and it promptly became the No. 1 most-downloaded album on iTunes.
When Apple was preparing to launch the campaign for its new iPod video Nano, it turned to the folk-pop artist Feist, whose simple, graphic video for the song "1234" mirrored the product perfectly. Director Patrick Daughters filmed the video for "1234" in one continuous tracking shot in a warehouse: Feist sings the cheerful song surrounded by dozens of young men and women dressed in primary colors; clearly untrained, they execute the basic choreography with winning good cheer.
"There was this kind of 'Goonies' feeling on the set, a real infectious happiness like 'us little scrappers pulled it together,' and I think the feeling of that comes through in the video," says Daughters, who has worked with Interpol, Snow Patrol, and Kings of Leon, among others. "The glossy, glamorous way of promoting through music videos is working for less and less artists. For me it's about letting the idea speak rather than the technique."
Back-to-basics worked brilliantly for Feist, a one-time cult favorite who sang "1234" last week at the Grammys, where she was nominated for four awards, including best new artist. But nowhere is the approach more pronounced than in the celebrated video for "Here It Goes Again," by the major-label rock band OK Go. The film is decidedly homemade-looking, a single unedited shot of four geeky hipsters shimmying, sort of, on treadmills. It's the anti-moonwalk, made for the cost of tape. It debuted on VH1, but fans started posting copies on YouTube, and within weeks the video had 4 million views. "Oh No," the band's second album, saw a 182 percent jump in Billboard's digital album charts a full year after it was released.
As the industry enters its eighth year of decline following decades of excess, old-fashioned virtues of ingenuity and inspiration are again becoming relevant. They're driving the way music and music videos look, sound, and feel. In a remarkable confluence of hard economic reality, rapid technological growth, and savvy consumption, a new generation of videos is speaking the language of a new generation of music fans - fans with endless choices and, it would seem, waning interest in the enforced bloat of yesteryear.
Even Dave Meyers, who waxes nostalgic for the golden age of big-money videos that kept him in the pink, is sanguine about the future of his art form. He's starting a company and hiring young directors who "thrive in this environment."
"There's just no need to make an 'event' video anymore," he says. "Everything is changing, and it's a wonderful thing. Everybody's frustrated and everybody's yearning, and I think we're about to stumble into something amazing. We have no money, but there's still a huge cultural following. It's such an intoxicating medium."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, go to boston.com/ae/music/blog. 