The “Gold Digger” Effect in Music Video Production
If you follow trends in music, or music videos, you’ve undoubtably noticed the design trend of three horizontal bands of video each showing different action, or three different shots of the same subject. The first time I noticed this was in a Kanye West music video for Gold Digger (w/ Jamie Foxx, director Hype Williams) where the action occurs in a wide-horizontal strip, leaving the top and bottom for meta information and overlays:
Although the top and bottom are not used explicitly, I feel they’re enough distinguished to justify naming this technique after the song. A better example might be Beyonce’s (w/ Slim Thug, director Hype Williams) Check on it, where we get to see Beyonce glittering on a strips of pink fabric top and bottom, or a three-way shot of smoking Slim Thug:
Then, there’s Jamie Foxx’s Unpredictable video (director, Hype Williams), where we see the same Hype-Williams effect:
Wikipedia, if you go check out his entry, has a blurb describing this:
For most of his more recent videos, Williams creates a letterbox effect by having a main image in the middle (where a film would be in letterbox format) and having a second image behind it, split by the first image. As he had done in the past, Williams continues to front each video he directs with a title sequence, which presents his name, the name of the music artist(s), and the name of the song in a stylized format matching the video clip to follow.
For some more examples, see Pharrell Williams’ (of NERD) Angel:
Or the Robin Thicke (w/ Pharrell Williams) song Wanna love you girl:
If we go check out Hype William’s latest videos page, we’ll see the videos we’ve listed, and more. So, although I’ve dubbed it the “Gold Digger” technique it could easily be called “Hype Williams’ 1-hit-wonder.” I would prefer to reward creativity and diversity over repeating the same theme at least five times in the past year. Aren’t you getting tired of seeing this?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is tagged with robin thicke, music video production, hype williams, pharrell williams, gold digger, slim thug, pink fabric, horizontal strip, design trend, west music, horizontal bands, video director, second image, title sequence, jamie foxx, first image, kanye west, wikipedia, music artist, blurb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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