Music videos that are inspiring — for the moment
I recently had a heart-to-heart with my business and creative partner Ryan Kahm about the quality of our creative work. Something had felt out of place and it had been affecting the quality of what we do... a kind of unknown, aimless wandering that sucked the soul out of things. It kind of meant ignoring things that were flashy for the sake of being flashy and going back to basics: the essence of what makes our work fun, charming and engaging.
I've been rooting through work that gives me the chills and I always come back to music videos. Music was my first dabbling into art and the vocabulary of it has shaped in as an artist in film as well. Music videos combine both and are special in the way that they allow us as filmmakers to go nearly insane... or to work in subtle, beautiful ways. Below are some of the videos that have been dancing in front of my eyes the last few weeks.
And all those videos are a friendly reminder not to make this shit:
It’s Nerf or… Huh?
It's time to resurrect the Killer Attack blog. I've cleared out all the stale blog posts from 2009 during my luke–warm initiation to blogging. Things have changed—most notably my resignation from the editor position of The Deli Los Angeles, a local music magazine and blog—and I think it's time to funnel my pent up writing energies into something fun again. In other words: Killer Attack is my mental dump of thoughts surrounding my work as well as photography and film making in general.
With that being said, I'm actually writing this post while my computer renders a freelance editing project. While I should complete that job in a few days, my production partner Ryan Kahm and I are deep into pre–production on a spec commercial for a toy company. I'm a bit hesitant to give details in public because it surrounds the launch of a completely new toy line, but lets just say I've been watching a ton of eye–burning 90s Nerf toy commercials.
Lets break this video down. First we have mini Zach Morris who, despite his ability to break the fourth wall like Deadpool, doesn't have a gun himself. That's all well and good though; looking at the Nerf arrows, I don't know if anyone really remembers how they barely floated—no, wafted—towards their target. What they really need is the Nerf ball guns. Whatever the balls were made of must have only barely passed the legal classification of "foam" as the rock hard projectile left a pretty good sting when your playground buddy shot it at you. Lastly, and the most pressing concern, is what kind of parent lets their kid hang out around abandoned industrial buildings? Don't they know those are the kind of places where Kurtwood Smith beats up Robocop?
I love production research.