Art Director

James H

Dynamic Icelandic duo Arni + Kinski return to music video to take Florence's new pre-Raphaelite look and give it a quasi-1930s makeover for Florence + The Machine's No Light No Light. 
It sees Florence being hounded by a 'neon pink voodoo gremlin', while teetering on the edge of a New York skyscraper, while a choir sings in a cathedral below.
Shot mainly in West London at St Augustine's Church on Kilburn High Road, the epic and dramatic theme matches the equally dramatic pounding soundtrack.

Arni and Kinski

Adam Smith

Skin Flicks

Chris Massey

Christopher Doyle

Gareth McEwen

Serena Noorani

James Bamford

Adam Lambert

Ailsa Robertson

Florence & The Machine 'No Light No Light' by Arni and Kinski

Enter the fantasy world of Oh Land and see her bound around a specially-built set, romp on a bed, go horse-riding through a picturesque creek, tapdance... and a host of other set pieces in Canada's promo for her bouncy White Nights...

Partizan

Oscar Romagosa

Jeff Pantaleo

Alba Barneda

Marc Gómez del Moral

Luis Cerveró

Susan Silverman

Oh Land 'White Nights' by Canada

Joji Koyama aka Woof Wan Bau's first video in ages is for the first official single by the charismatic Barbara Panther - a combination of animation, live action and inspired model-making.
The singer's irrepressible performance is always central but Joji also employs a number of techniques to to evoke the lyrics, combining a mixture of epic-looking miniature models of classical figures and everyday objects, inventively cast from sugar, salt and baking powder in order to easily break down, suggesting the fragile nature of manmade empires. The models were shot to look lifesize, alongside plaster casts of lifesize limbs that were used to scrape graphic patterns on the floor.
"I started making music videos for friends, so these days the idea of making a video for someone I feel a sense of affinity to is quite important for me," says Joji. "With Barbara there was a slight coincidence that her record is produced by Matthew Herbert (who I've collaborated with) so even though I didn't know her it all felt quite close. 
"Usually I would avoid doing performance videos but Barbara is such an incredible performer that I wanted to try and keep the focus very much on her. We gathered a small team of friends and a super enthusiastic crew and had a really fun shoot. I think Barbara's enthusiasm rubbed off on everyone."

Nexus Productions

Woof Wan

Cedric Gairard, Julia Parfitt

Beccy McCray

Martin Testar

Paul Hardcastle @ Trim

Time Based Arts

Duncan Russell

Joanne Croxford

Prime Focus

Barbara Panther’s Empire by Woof Wan-Bau

With live projections by Frieder Weiss, the 'engineer of the arts' known for developing software like <a href=" http://frieder-weiss.de/eyecon/index.html " target="_blank">Eyecon</a> that uses human motion to trigger other media.

AlexandLiane

Jon Adams

Factory Films

Will Bex

Suzy Davis

Munky

James Hackett

Kylie Minogue’s Get Outta My Way by AlexandLiane

Some nice animated touches, effective slo-mo and good art direction (by James Hatt) in this poptastic and colourful treatment for Scissor Sisters' next single Any Which Way from Ace Norton.
<a href="http://feed.partizan.com/scissor-sisters-go-any-which-way-with-ace-nor" target="_blank">Interview</a> with Ace about the video

Ace Norton

Claudine Henderson

Kim Gueldner

James Rose

Simone Grattarola

Dilly Gent

Scissor Sisters’ Any Which Way by Ace Norton

The follow-up to Vickers' debut No. 1 single (and the second track from her chart-topping album Songs From The Tainted Cherry Tree) is the poppy The Boy Who Murdered Love. 
James Copeman delivers a bouncy, half-animated slice of fun with Vickers - who has come a long way since X Factor - giving a great performance.

James Copeman

Margo Mars

Black Dog Films

Darren Baldwin

Aubrey Woodiwiss

Claire Stubbs

Diana Vickers’ The Boy Who Murdered Love by James Copeman

Eyebrows will be raising, brows furrowing and teenage girls' mouths shaping into pouts (all possibly at the same time) as Tinchy dumps his pop-friendly hip-hop for something rather tougher. It's a brave move.
Adam Powell rises to the challenge and continues to grow his reputation as 'the urban guy' with this slick but gritty performance video. Looks great, as you'd expect, and is built to last.

Adam Powell

Rob Mercer

Richard Mott

Simon Poontip

Tinchy Stryder’s Gangsta? by Adam Powell

Tinchy-Stryder’s-Gangsta?-by-Adam-Powell

Blurring a few boundaries, with interactivity that genuinely adds something to the mix, Arno Salters at Stink Digital has created this promo for Diesel's Spring/Summer line (and Be Stupid manifesto) for Anomaly in London, which also doubles as the debut video for breaking musical talent Josep Xorto and his forthcoming single A Hundred Lovers. 
Very cool, because it doesn't shout about how cool it is.

Anomaly, London

Stink Films

Arno Salters

Mark Pytlik

Jane Shackleton

Simon Sanderson, Jess Fletcher

Envy, London

Diesel: Spring Summer/Josep's A Hundred Lovers by Arno Salters

Saam

Paul Weston

Martin Zahringer

Alex Barber

Teddy Forance

Tom Lyndsay

The Mill

Adam Grint

Ross Anderson

Cheryl Cole feat. Will.I.Am’s 3 Words by Saam

Cheryl-Cole-feat.-Will.I.Am’s-3-Words-by-Saam

The entire cast was made up of both mine and Remi's family and friends. Our nephews and nieces gave stellar performances. It was great to witness their sheer delight of having a cream pies smooshed in their faces. These were the moments that make you smile that the video was about. Ultimately I wanted something honest and heart felt that makes you feel good".

Watch: <a href="http://studio.adbeast.com/direct_room_access.asproomcid=HlQYGVI">here</a>

Merge @ Crossroads Films

Harvey

Trudy Bellinger

Francesca Barnes

Naomi Parry

Louise Constad

Cut+Run

Bob Brimson

Sam Jones

Remi Nicole’s Standing Tears Apart by Harvey

Popcore are no strangers to the rock music video - and this effort for Biffy Clyro is blisteringly good. Shot on location at Chiswick House, Alex Barber's dynamic photography captures the band at the height of their pomp, and the grand scale online effects were devised by the team at Chimney Pot in Popcore's native Sweden.

Watch: <a href="http://www.colonelblimp.com/view-video/item2222/">here</a>

Popcore

Charlotte Woodhead

Colonel Blimp

John Hassay

New Selecta

Hannah Edwards

Robin Siwe/Popcore

Biffy Clyro’s The Golden Rule by Popcore

Rags to riches (to rags) story of the new pop duo that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. More like this year's wannabe Hoosiers.
Harvey is more used to doing straight pop performances, but he grabs his chance to 'break out of the box' and try his hand at a fantasy-comedy narrative with gusto.

Harvey B-Brown on making the video for The Yeah You's 15 Minutes
"Commissioners can't help categorizing you; they see your reel and then commission you to keep doing the genre of work that they can see you do, and that you have proved that you do well.

"My idea was to create a narrative for the song. As Andy Warhol said 'in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes' and I told a complicated rags to riches story (and then back to rags again) in a very concise and condensed 3.28 mins.
"I had a limited budget, but buckets of enthusiasm as I could see that this was my golden ticket to break out from my box! I managed to squeeze and cajole my cast and crew into cramming in the entire storyline of what essentially should have been a two-day shoot into one day and on a shoestring.
"Nick and Mike from the band were very collaborative and we all enjoyed work-shopping ideas a few days before the shoot. I put all my energies into telling a fun story, and devising smooth transitions to take us from one scene to the next. Then every time I was asked to brief anyone from the record company, or my amazing art department or editor with the plot outline I was always faced with the same comment: "and you are gonna shoot all that in ONE day"
"But the shoot was a dream. It started off well as we shot Tracy-Ann Oberman's Talk Tonight show as our first scene at nine in the morning. She had brilliant comic timing that made us all laugh, and that set the tone for the day.
"I can honestly say I have never enjoyed a shoot so much - including the adrenaline rush of knowing that I couldn't afford to drop any set ups because that would then leave a hole in my edit. I simply didn't have time to cover more than the allotted sync to each scene. It was strictly an hour and then I HAD to move on.
"I'm very proud of this piece of work. From a personal perspective it is ground breaking for me as it is nothing like my other work."

Merge@Crossroads

Harvey Bertram Brown

Fran Barnes

James Bolton

Rawdon de Fresnes

David Lamb

Brendan Robertson

Claire Eastman

Steve Ackroyd

Bob Brimson &amp; Tamara Brooks

The Yeah Yous’ 15 Minutes by Harvey Bertram Brown

Trudy's new one for new pop cutie Pixie Lott is a big production number, featuring a whole new dance craze.
Which sort of hurts, as she explains below.

Trudy Bellinger on making the video for Pixie Lott's Mama Do
"This song has an infectious clap that runs throughout and I wanted to visually reference the clapping and embellish it as the unique hook of the video.
"As this is Pixie's debut video it was important for the label to show off all her incredible talents - she is stunning, and a brilliant dancer. I wanted the choreography to really stand out as being fresh and different. The clapping was the obvious starting point to create a fusion of pat-a-cake, capoeira and physical theatre. In order to achieve this fusion of styles, I worked with two choreographers: Paul Roberts for his slick sharpness, and Kate Pearson for her innovative physical theatre.
"The fusion really worked, and after two days of intense rehearsals we had an amazingly tight piece, although we had problems with the twenty dancers being covered in bruises! In order to get the attitude across and the intensity with the choreography they really had to slap each other. We had to change the styling to hide all the bruises, particularly on the thighs.
"The concept was also brought about by the lyrics, which are about sneaking out in the night and getting up to no good without your parents knowing. The idea of her crawling through her bed into this other world made it fantastical and gave me creative licence to have a few surreal elements. The bed scene was made up of thirty or so mattresses inside a tent of giant silk. The light was amazing, and once inside the bed set it felt so calming and peaceful. This serenity really reflects in Pixie's performance in this section.
"Through a door in the bed we see Pixie and the girls arrive through a locker into a locker room where they start to prepare themselves for the clap off. I shot at MC Motors and as this location is used a lot, I didn't want it to look like other videos but liked the textures and the structure. We built a locker room with a leopard print floor, a boudoir/girls cloakroom with a pink perspex floor, leopard print drapes and a circular red leather pouffe.
"The contrast of the hot pink next to the red brought a contemporary fashion edge to the video. Using red and pink neons sewn together with lots of pipes and industrial props, the main dance area was transformed into a more power station or factory feel with a club edge creating an exciting backdrop to the clap off.
"Denzil Armour lit it and Sam Brown did second unit, whilst Mark Adcock shot Bolex enabling me to get coverage of the six sets and choreography in one day. The drama of the clap-off was created shooting at 100fps and speed ramping and jump cutting. And Ducati supplied all the bikes for the guys as well as Pixie's white one, which we added her logo to."

Hera King

Alicia Farren

Barry Wasserman

Denzil Armour

Cynthia Lawrence

Kevin Ford

Karen Alder

Henry

Dan Curwin

Pixie Lott’s Mama Do by Trudy Bellinger

A shiny glitterball for The Noisettes' new pop direction by Kinga Burza.
Noisettes' Shingai is surrounded by dancing girls on a set that's part-Star Trek, part-70s TV pop show, in a collection of snazzy disco outfits including a very fetching silver swimsuit. For some reason I'm thinking Boney M.
And what with the indoor lightning bolts, now we know how she gets hair like that.

Kinga Burza

Ross McLennan

Nasrin Jean Baptiste, K

Sherman Hawthorne, Bianca Tuovi

Claudine Henderson, K

Ben Rogers

The Noisettes’ Don’t Upset The Rhythm by Kinga Burza

Super-duper video for star-in-the-making Vanessa Brown by Ross Cooper and Bugsy Riverbank Steel, aka OneInThree.
Ross and Bugsy bring all their usual graphic invention to an idea based on the song's break-up theme - a revolving removals box, revealing different aspects, and different sizes, of VV. As they explain below, they applied typical invention to make it happen properly.
While all this might overwhelm some aspiring pop stars, it feels like pretty much the ideal vehicle for someone who is going to be described as vibrant and vivacious an awful lot in the next few months. She's great in this.

http://uk.youtube.com/watchv=yWZGj7PVnG4&amp;feature=channel[/youtube]

OneInThree on making the video for VV Brown's Leave
"We had a really fun shoot, Vanessa is a really fantastic natural performer, even when being spun round all day in a variety of differently sized MDF boxes.
"Apart from the background plate of the apartment, the shoot was focused on a series of set builds on motorized turntables which we synchronised to the audio track. Every time we swapped boxes we used a plumb-bob on a ceiling pulley to centre our boxes on the turntables.

"We also built are own amateur motion control rig using a piece of sponge stuck to the turntable, as it span round it hit a computer mouse which triggered one of four Quicktime movies to play that acted as our digi-slate and audio playback. We needed 4 movies for one each for side of the box, depending on the way she needed to be facing at the specific point in the track.
"Every time she turned away from camera she had time to compose herself and find a new pose, she enjoyed herself so much that she was really disappointed when we wrapped."

OneInThree

Sarah Tognazzi

Daniel Trapp

James Banford

Fernando Regin

Carmen Montanez

V V Brown’s L.E.A.V.E.! by OneInThree

V-V-Brown’s-L.E.A.V.E.!-by-OneInThree

Lily Allen is back, with lyrical sharpness and knowing on-camera presence fully intact.And in Nez&#39;s video for The Fear, he counterpoints Lily&#39;s witty satire on the world of celebrity, with an inventive, surreal production number.Lily goes directly from caravan to country pile - Wrest Park in Bedford - gliding through a platoon of dancing butlers, into rooms reflecting her role as a &#39;weapon of massive consumption&#39;, before the climax in the fabulous gardens of the estate - featuring her name spelled out in giant letters.It&#39;s an impressive leap into the pop world for Nez after his MVA-winning clip for Kano&#39;s Hustler. And as he explains below, he thinks that Lily&#39;s cautionary cry for help comes straight from the heart...&nbsp;

Georgina Filmore

Jake Polonsky

Miranda Joyce

Samantha Hiller

Lucy Manning

Alex Reynolds

Paul Harrison

Dan Sherwen

Lily Allen 'The Fear' by Nez

Lily Allen - The Fear (Explicit)

Maybe it was his impressive appearance on Sesame Street a while ago that did the trick. Otherwise this uplifting and supremely colourful video for James Blunt by Kinga Burza really has come out of nowhere.
Kinga turns an MOR pop cliché on its head - and recasts Blunt's earnest image - by making the singers' orchestral backing the focus of the video: they're young, gorgeous and colour-coded.
Well, we know Kinga likes colour. And the mood matches this vibrant visual idea - like a kids' TV show with better art direction, glam and casting. And it keeps producing to the very end.
Very nice work - and a ray of sunshine amid this bloody hideous weather - which also seriously improves JB's CQ (Coolness Quotient).

Gail Davey

Adam Frisch

Claire Edmondson

Dan Lonzini

Tim Nash

James Blunt’s Love Love Love by Kinga Burza

First the big pop one: Sneaky Sound System is a glossy, good-looking, well crafted, Daft Kylie-meets-2001 confection for a Aussie dance outfit creating infectious, very-big-over-there, soon-to-be-huge-over-here electro-pop.
Lots of cool LED, and some very cheeky costumes from stylist Hannah Edwards.


It's a delight. Emiliana takes us through The Art Of Living, and the worst thing you can say about it is this involves painting patterns on snail shells. It's almost certainly shot in Super 8mm and looks blooming marvellous, especially with James's graphics and effects work all over it. If Big Jumps becomes Emiliana's biggest record in the UK so far (it should be) this is going to be a big help.

Tamsin Glasson

Christopher Sabogal

CJ Hassay for Warner Music and ELMLOWE Ltd

Sneaky Sound System and Emiliana Torrini by James Copeman

Shane Davey's new 23 Deluxe (featuring Daniel Joe) video involves young women going into rooms at the "Motel Deluxe", removing their clothing, taking out the tools of their trade, and going to work.
They're spies!
All good clean, healthy, good-looking fun.

Davey Inc.

Shane Davey

Jem Golding

Vid Price

Laura Lewis

23 Deluxe’s Show Me Happiness by Shane Davey

More superior, hard-to-resist pop with a colour-coded video by Sarah Chatfield. Like her pal Kinga's video for Katy Perry, Annie has her girlfriends to back her up - although this time they have clothes on.
And lovely clothes too. Sarah is now back working with Chris Sweeney on their second big film for YSL's next menswear collection. Of course the fashion label has been rocked by the death at the weekend of it's founder, Yves Saint Laurent - the designer who <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/02/europe/menkes.php">redefined women's fashion</a>.
He would probably have approved of those little black dresses...

Sarah Chatfield

Jamie Wilkinson

Golden Square Post

Annie's I Know Your Girlfriend Hates Me by Sarah Chatfield

James Appleton directed the highly successful video for The Futureheads' last single The Beginning Of The Twist - the cheeky offspring of Take On Me and Over And Over - and now he's come up with a worthy successor.
For Radio Heart, James has placed the band in (surprise, surprise) an old-fashioned trannie - for all you youngsters, that's a transistor radio.
In fact the whole thing takes place in a pre-digital world, when it was all about twiddling knobs and young men and women sat in bleak bedsits with only the wireless for company. I remember it well.
But why is the drummer plugging a TV channel

James Appleton on making the Futureheads' Radio Heart video
"I knew I needed to involve a narrative element, something with some kind of progression between the guy and the girl in the song. I wanted to keep it fun and surreal, and to keep performance material at the forefront in the promo.
"I started to think about radio waves and heart monitors. Moving further I looked at radio tuning dials and how they show different frequencies, and thought it would be fun to split images as though different parts are on different frequencies, drifting in and out of tune with each other.
"Sound can of course create pictures in the mind's eye, and I thought I could build the narrative of the guy and the girl around this. They are searching for each other in their own imaginations by listening to each other's voices on the radio, and dreaming. Tonally, I wanted to tap into the slightly melancholic undercurrent in the track, but again without getting too serious about it.
"In terms of making the video, overall I wanted to go for an analogue look rather than a digital one, organic rather than synthetic. For the radio waves we filmed a real oscilloscope rather than using animation. James Hatt [production designer] and I made sure we found an old analogue one so that we got the natural movement and luminance in the waves. The sound designer Alan plugged an old synth into it to make different shaped waves. In post these were then keyed, re-coloured and laid into the shots.
"I also wanted to use a real radio for the foreground radio dial images and key through these, rather than animate. I knew that when panning across the radio on a macro lens it wouldn't be perfectly smooth, but I wanted the character this adds. We did look through many radios before finding the right one!
"I was able to have two small two wall sets, so I tried to make sure the involvement of the characters in the promo made full use of this. I wanted his set to be grey and aged to stand for lifelessness, monotony, drabness, and for her set to be predominantly red, for life, love, passion, bringing colour to his world. I thought that the very simple contrast would work in this context.
"Mike (the DoP) and I talked about quite a quite high contrast lighting style that had a sort of surreal fairytale flavour, but also highlighted the two actors' isolation, like Edward Hopper's 'Girl in the Café'.
"During our Flame time, Alix came up with a great idea to key through footage of a plasma ball to create the waves, which come from the top of the radio mast. We also saturated foreground waves slightly more than background ones to create a bit more depth in the images. Finally we applied a soft grain and vignette to age the film and glue the thing together visually, thereby marrying the overall look with the ideas in the promo."

Grasshopper Films

James Appleton

Clare Spencer

Michael Beresford

Alan Dobson

Kenny Gibb

Gideon Mountford

Futureheads’ Radio Heart by James Appleton 

The big soul voice of Duffy gets a big mod workout for her first single from Dan Wolfe. With a special extra something. 
It's a Sixties disco inferno, and the stunt work is astonishing. That's gotta hurt...

James H

Art Director

22 videos featuring James H

2011 (2)

2010 (6)

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