"I really wanted to do a stereotypical, artist-sings-to-camera one-shot video - but with the twist of the steadicam operator being shit," Stuart explains. "It took us about six hours to shoot - we had broken it down into three sections to make it easier to film and cut. We only spent £75 on the whole production because of very helpful friends, family and pets. All the post and audio was covered by The Picture Production Company and the grade was done at Smoke and Mirrors."

Excellent showcase for the unsigned Exlovers by newcomer Jamie Chung. It's a straightforward performance that's nicely located and art directed - and finds itself understandably attracted to the very watchable girl singer.

Extreme lo-fi video slice-and-dice for the unpronouncable Dananananaykroyd by Stephen Agnew, that's been selected as video of the week on Cerys Matthews' show on 6music. Stephen explains that the video was shot in sunny Glasgow "with help from the Glasgow city council and Botanic Gardens and hindrance from some nosey community support officer." Probably called Mr Mackay, or something. http://www.youtube.com/watchv=EJqB0Po5ulU[/youtube]

Finely rendered and highly enjoyable welter of murderous mayhem and gore, illustrated by Damien Weighill, and animated by Stephen Wake. Which might possibly upset fans of Mother Teresa... Damien is a very fine illustrator, whose work you almost certainly know. His projects include Bad Nature and Back To Square One, as well as supplying drawings for the likes of Cadbury, Ford and Virgin TV. And he did the Giggle Party album cover. http://www.youtube.com/watchv=zxl85Y_VSvM[/youtube] Damien Weighill on making the video for Giggle Party's Jason Bought A Hatchet "The two of us studied graphic design together at university and have a shared love of using elements from everyday life/popular culture and taking them out of context or taking a skewed look at them. "I already had an oddball cast of celebrities which I had drawn for Giggle Party's album The Holes In Your Face Are Pleasing, and it didn't take much of a jump for us to decide to use them as the band in the video and then for Steve to suggest that Darth Vader could be drumming with mini lightsabers. "I think that is a pretty good example of how we worked on storyboarding each part of the song, bouncing ideas back and forth. Then the work was split with me illustrating and Steve making sense of the countless drawings I threw at him, taking them and breathing life into the whole thing with his animation. "The song has a strong story running through it with almost every line throwing a new image into your head. We looked at it as our job to find interesting and unexpected ways of presenting this story. "We were lucky enough with this being our first time working on a music video to have a client in Giggle Party that got fully behind our ideas and allowed us to have a lot of fun with the project."

Here's a dark and sexy beast for The Newham Generals on Dizzy Rascal's new label Dirtee Stank - featuring an incisive cameo by the label founder himself - directed by the young team Hope Audikana. Dizzee's always a charismatic presence, but it's the gritty, provocative storyline and excellent direction and editing which marks this out as special stuff. Hope Audikana is Ryan Hope and Egoitz Audikana who got together as runners a few years back (Ryan is from Sunderland, Egoitz from Bilbao) and are now signed to Great Guns for commercials. They also profess not to be grime fans, but they'll be in demand after this... Hope Audikana on making the video for Newham Generals' Head Get Mangled "Rachel McClelland [Dirtee Stank's label manager] approached us to do a video for the guys last year, and we were unsure as we were not huge fans of grime. However, when we heard the track, it was what we had been waiting for really. "The brief was open, and we were invited to submit an idea. We were a bit unsure how they would take it, but they were digging it and it was a massive pleasure to work with people who support your creativity rather than pulling it apart. "Making the video itself quite possibly took a few years off our lives. We shot on location in Surrey in an abandoned hospital, with no electricity, water or toilet, which definitely made us dartboard material over at Arri. "However, we have to say, Tony Miller and his men were simply amazing. We know them very well from our running days, but they really come through for us here. Not only was it a long, arduous day, they made our film look absolutely amazing under the hideous circumstances! "All in all, it was all about the crew on this, it continues to excite us to this day the attitude people demonstrate in making films. Inspiring stuff."

This is a lovely song by the Danish band Our Broken Garden, and what seems like a simple Bolex-shot video by Phil Molloy - featuring their very watchable vocalist Anna - turns out to be quite strange and clever too. Involving lots of old-fashioned white A-frame tents. Phil says: "It was shot in Denmark, in the surrounding area to where Anna and Soren from the band live. I wrote the treatment, and then realised that you can't really get 'A' frame tents anymore, let alone white ones. So I ended up having to make them. "We also got stampeded by horses on the shoot!" As you can see. http://www.youtube.com/watchv=GUqRUdE0vnQ[/youtube]

These two videos go back a bit - the halcyon days of 2008 - and you may know them from various 'best of' lists elsewhere. But it's only right and proper to give a shout-out on Promo to the dynamic directing duo that is That Go. That Go are Noel Paul and Stefan Moore, who met on the DXARTS program at the University of Washington (where Noel is still a PhD candidate) and began their partnership when they entered a video competition for then-unsigned band Thunderheist's Jerk It - with a video featuring a blonde girl called Anna, a rooster called Caleb, and a considerable amount of jerking. Their work has even been identified as being emblematic of the "dead end of western civilization" - possibly due to the scary use of cheesy pop on the interactive site accompanying the NPSH vid. In which case: bring it on! They now have a new video for New York band Apes & Androids, for which they've made this brief teaser. And below Noel and Stefan discuss their two videos to date. That Go on making the video for Thunderheist's Jerk It "We found out about Thunderheist's video contest right before it ended and decided it was too late to get something together in time for the deadline. Thus defeated, we kicked around some ideas for what we 'would have done' and came up with a concept so intriguing that it seemed worth actually pursuing. "We then immediately found a generous rooster owner on a web forum for people who raise chickens and our friend Mike Ragen volunteered his camera (Mike DoP'd Matt Daniels' vids Lolita & Caskets). Our friend Anna agreed to model. The whole thing came together very quickly. The contest was ending the day after we shot, so we spent the night cutting together a teaser to send to Thunderheist. They liked it enough to extend the deadline. "We wanted the video to be simple and iconic, so we kept the ingredients minimal and concentrated on the incremental development of a single idea. The video acts as a bit of a rorschach, people's reactions to it tend to reveal a lot. We certainly don't deny that the use of the rooster lends itself to provocative interpretations and a certain blatant joke, but to be honest we didn't really focus on that while writing. "The initial concept had more to do with body motion and the desire to make something that looked as hot as the song is. We wanted to take the hip hop video cliché of the jiggling booty and treat it in a way that was abstract and humorous, focusing on body parts that are less traditionally objectified such as the underarm, shoulder, and cheeks. We wanted to shake these body parts until the motion reached heights that were both sexually charged and comically absurd. "To achieve this effect our friend Eric designed a shaking mechanism that Anna held in her hand just off camera. It worked well. Crazy looking shocks reverberated through her whole body at very high speed. It was all captured at 120fps and then we retimed the footage to match the beat in post. The video premiered on pitchfork.tv. It has since received more attention than we ever imagined." That Go on making the video for NPSH's Sophisticated Side Ponytail "Natalie Portman's Shaved Head are wonderful people and we love working with them. We wanted to create a sensory overload of pop-culture iconography within a rapid time frame. Aesthetically, we tried to combine a rap video performance style with the hypothetical contents of a 14 year old girl's hard drive. "Our friends Mollie & Matthew helped us by making collages and then we combined them into huge geodesic Quicktime VRs which we screen-captured for the backgrounds of the video. Some of these backgrounds can be examined in more detail at the Ponytail Web Zone. In addition, net artist jpegmess was very generous in allowing us to sample his spirit arcs through the spectrum. "The reaction to the video has been pleasingly controversial. It received praise from fashion designers, media artists, and bloggers like Perez Hilton. Cahiers du Cinema mentioned the video with the remark that 'Internet est un accélérateur de vie.' "At the same time, we released the video right around when that adbusters article about "hipsters" being the "dead end of western civilization" came out. A lot of bloggers identified our video as emblematic of that article's thesis. Alex Blagg of VH1's "Best Week Ever" said: "This Video Might Mark The Exact Moment That Our Culture Finally Died...It's pretty amazing how something with so much visible stimulus can manage to say absolutely nothing. Way to go, hipsters." This was very exciting feedback for us."