Thao & The Get Down Stay Down 'Phenom' by Erin S Murray and Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux

A month ago, not many people had even heard of Zoom. Now it's crucial to our daily lives, and directors Erin S Murray and Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux have made the inevitable leap with the communication tool while the world lives in lockdown: they have directed the first Zoom-based music video.

The primary accolade goes to Oakland artist Thao Nguyen - aka Thao & The Get Down Stay Down. According to Variety, the pandemic crisis scuppered the planned shoot for her song Phenom, and her manager suggested that they shoot an alternative using Zoom. It was shot over the course of several hours on March 29th and released just a couple of days later. 

A cast of eight dancers appear on the Zoom grid around Nguyen, performing a routine choreographed by Murray (she has worked on Ed Sheeran and Charli XCX videos as a choreographer and now branching out as a director too). They each perform the same routine in their own home spaces - but then they begin to 'interact' with each other through the Zoom screen grid.  

In many ways the video is also something of a throwback to the first flush of YouTube, and early crowd-sourced videos like Sour's Hibi no neiro. But Schaulin-Rioux has also had recent experience of making a crowd-sourced video, for regular collaborators Pup's Free At Last, featuring fans of the band attempting to perform a song that the band had written but yet to record. 

It was certainly not inevitable that the the first Zoom video would be great, but in fact they knocked it out of the park.