Phil Griffin, former ultra-prolific purveyor of the British Pop Vid, makes his big break- through into Rock, with Kings of Leon. Walls do indeed come tumbling down. Phil shot the band in Nashville, then added the scorching VFX at Rushes back in London. The Rushes team led by Leo Weston comped the band in front of an exploding wall, then added fire, explosions, debris, bricks, and lighting effects. Simone Grattarola graded it, and he says, "This was a really exciting project to work on... I think people will be - excuse the pun- blown away by it."

It's a low budget interpretation of 'band in a white studio' performance for Feeder's latest single, evidently involving four weeks of solid post insanity. Which Robin "El Skid" Schmidt describes below, rather entertainingly... "El Skid" on making Feeder's Tracing Lines video "Stuart Gosling made a vid a few years back using three DV cameras set up to shoot three angles at the same time and I wanted to do something similar but green screen so we had lots of guitar arms sticking out at the same time. "Feeder always seem to look really morose and sombre in their vids so we wanted to do something fun, where they looked like they were having a good time. And the guys are actually a good laugh. We shot three Sony EX1's using the XDCam EX format, one on the right, one on the left and one in the middle. Just a regular green-screen shoot. "Then the post. With all those takes, shot on Hi-Def, there was a massive amount of footage - and I was doing all the post myself on my own computer. Disaster. My computer's way too slow and I just sat there swearing at it for hours while it tried to work out what I was asking it to do, crunching through keying hundreds of layers in the same shot. "Finally the graphics card just gave up and started making noises like Harrier jump jet. I had to finish it off at a friend's place. He's a motion graphics artist and was bragging about how fast his machine was. We broke that one too, at three o clock in the morning, and then he started swearing at it and swearing at me for getting him involved. "We used After Effects to comp it all together, which is a brilliant programme, but when you have 150 layers - all with names like Wide G F, WIde G L, WIde G R - you start to lose the plot really quickly. "I've never felt like I'd bitten off way more than I could chew this badly before. I was just seeing layers, and stupid 3D camera moves, and every time you made a mistake it disruptedeverything that went before, so you had to start from the beginning again. Bit like linear editing except with 150 layers at a time. "There are lots of references to old Feeder videos, like Buck Rogers and Come Back Around, but I just like the fact that all the technical stuff is technically wrong. The keying is crap, the grading had to be done on a laptop because everything else was broken, and everything's just thrown on top of everything else (normally you edit the shots you want, but here I just put every take in the video). But somehow it all hangs together."

On one level Stuart Gosling's video for Universal Classics and Jazz artist Jonathan Ansell is a conventionally slick and cinematic showcase for the ex-G4 singer's solo debut. But it actually could be a pioneering piece of work. It's almost certainly the first music video in the UK shot with the revolutionary RED camera system. The RED camera claims to offer twice the resolution of HD-cam, plus greater latitude than HD in terms of light sensitivity. It's sensor is as big as a frame of 35mm, so the camera can also take 35mm film lenses and replicate film-like depth of field when the camera is shooting at 4K. And Hollywood has already picked up on it: Peter Jackson's latest movie Crossing The Line, was shot on RED prototypes. What is interesting, and somewhat controversial, about RED is that it has not been developed by a recognised camera manufacturer, but by Oakley, the sunglasses and sportswear company. Gosling had his first outings with this new technology shooting a short film and a commercial before suggesting it to Universal commissioner Cynthia Lole for the Ansell job. The shoot, at the historic Coronet cinema in London's Notting Hill, went very well: Gosling shot two commercials as well as the promo in a single 12-hour day. "It was a very fast day and I treated the camera just as I would a 35mm camera. My lighting and exposure and composition methods were exactly the same, and as usual I relied mainly on my instincts to move quickly and not shoot multiple takes."But the uniqueness of the RED cam also posed a problem: the camera records to files rather than tape, and it has its own file system which happens to be incompatible to the Mystika system used by many post houses, including Concrete. "There was a lot of scratching of heads and jiggery-pokery to make it work," says David Cox, MD of Concrete Post and the visual effects artist on the job. And it was Cox who came up with the answer: REDCINE, a programme (still in beta) which takes RED files and translates them into the industry standard. The 4K and 2K files from the camera were "digitally developed" at Concrete, then all of the post took place under the one roof, starting at Metropolis, the editing house now situated at Concrete, where Guy Morley edited the clip. Cox then took Morley's cut into one of Concrete's Mistika HD suites for the final online and colour grade. "The images from the RED camera were great to grade from," Cox reveals. "They initially had a flat feeling similar to film that had been scanned. However, they contained a rich depth of colour that allowed very accurate colour picking, and this is important for music videos where it is common to apply a different treatment to the artist's skin tones." Concrete are so excited by the RD camera's potential that they have established a strategic alliance with Axis Films, the Shepperton-based HD camera rental house which provided on-shoot support and accessories for the Ansell video, and who are now investing in a couple of RED cameras. The two companies plan to provide an integrated shoot-to-post production support for the camera's subsequent outings in the UK. "Clients can have an end-to-end solution," says Cox. Meanwhile, Stuart Gosling has now taken the RED camera to Australia where he is shooting a post-heavy video for Vanessa Amorossi. "This camera is perfect for the job," he says. "We'll be working for a month in Sydney with big team of people who all need instant access to the data. Having all the data in such hi resolution means that everyone has them immediately after the shoot and post flow stays in the digital realm. If we shot on film we would constantly be going back to the analogue world, where most operations take time and money." Gosling is under illusions that the RED camera is perfect, but most seem to be associated with being a new piece of kit. "There are problems - overheats and crashes, monitoring is difficult and not many experienced focus pullers are up to speed yet. That puts more pressure on me to deal with technical issues rather than the creative ones. But we are all working out the bugs." Looks like it could be a RED future. ? Stuart Gosling is represented for music videos in the UK by Debs Herbert at Y-I London

Band Aid I think I require stitches. Rushes, without a hint of embarrassment, tackle one of the modern yuletide classics en masse, and lovingly recreate Nigel Dick's video from 1984 just about shot-for-shot (unfortunately without shoulder pads and George Michael's frosted hair). Frankly it has to be seen to be believed and, apart from a few flat notes (and at one stage a complete absence of actual singing), this might well be an improvement on the original - especially when Joce Capper cuts loose, and then rockin' Adrian Seery gives it the full Bono. So what's next MPC's new head of 3D Jonathan Davies doing Shakey's Merry Christmas Everyone Here's hoping...

Talk about a hard act to follow. Doing a video for a cover of Massive Attack's Teardrop invites all kinds of comparisons with one of the iconic videos of forever. Perhaps not surprisingly Diamond Dogs' Phil and Olly have steered well clear of animatronic foetuses (foeti) for Newton Faulkner's new version. They've created their own little wonder instead: there's Newton plucking his soft-stringed guitar, and there he is again, and again... It's a one-shot affair, but the really clever thing about this video is that it defies gravity. In fact it was shot with a rotating moco camera rig on a rotating set - it was rotated 90 degrees in between takes so that the ceiling and walls temporarily became a floor. The whole thing required 20 plates of motion control. To maximise the budget and schedule, Phil and Olly worked with a team at Prime Focus London (PFL) from an early stage: the camera moves were pre-visualised in 3D by Bryan Servante using Maya. After the shoot, CADS winning colourist George K graded the footage with a warm glow and then had to identically match-grade the remaining 19 plates whilst creating second passes. It wasn't an easy task - lighting came from nothing but in-situ lamps. Then Dan Lorenzini used Flame to seamlessly join the twenty plates and add details that help turn the set into a wintry, moonlit limbo-world. These extra touches included tracking additional mirror reflections from one take to another, atmospheric light flares, steam, snow and enhancing Newton's cold breath.

A team at Smoke & Mirrors completed the grade, online, 3D and effects work on the video. Senior Flame operator Jon Berridge provided VFX supervision on set, then worked with fellow operators Barry Greaves Isabella Laner and Ally Burnett to create crucial additions such as the icicles and spreading frost in the winter shots, and vignettes of leaves changing colour in the autumnal set-up. Extra elements such as snow, glitter and blue summer skies were also composited in Flame. Smoke & Mirrors 3D team headed by Rebekah King-Britton added to the Spring/Summer shots with blooming cherry blossom flowers and a giant rose which band member Keisha Buchanan appears to be sitting inside, these elements were both modelled in Maya, rigged, textured and animated so they appear to come into flower.