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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Shynola ... not just shoe polish
Wednesday 14 January @ 12:44:58 |
 by Patrick Johnson
A faceless, finned creature swims awkwardly through an abandoned aquatic underworld full of iridescent gelatinous shapes to a crooning Thom Yorke. A beam of light shining from our new friend’s head finds familiarity—a home complete with a Lazyboy and a dinner table. Ketchup bottle included. A pixilated, low-res Atari game, where a mischievous squirrel pours his own shots from the bottle at a bar and a piece of bread with a face jumps out of a toaster singing background to a euro-disco track, hums along.
A band dark as shadows with white eyes rocks out in the bed of an antique pickup truck playing chicken with another truck full of insane indigenous demons with faces like skeletons driving through a desert with a sky as red as blood, all while an animated dancer sways exotically in a shimmering swimsuit.
If you didn’t recognize these synopses, you probably haven’t seen three of the latest music videos directed and produced by progressive animators Shynola. To someone who is unfamiliar with their work these summaries must seem LCD-laced hallucinations or dreams of a schizophrenic. Not so, but they are obviously not the simplistic music videos you’re used to seeing on MTV and VH1. However, it does make you wonder what is going on inside the minds of the boys at Shynola.
Shynola
According to Chris Harding of Shynola they are just “four guys who met at art school in southeast England.” In more detail, Shynola are Chris Harding, Gideon Baws, Richard (Kenny) Kenworthy and Jason Groves. The guys’ first big break came when they sent a letter and a showreel to the label MoWax resulting in an opportunity to do a short animated sequence to the U.N.K.L.E track, “Gun’s Blazing.” It was incorporated as a visual into U.N.K.L.E’s live show and used as a background during innovative U.N.K.L.E. DJ and producer James Lavelle’s acceptance speech at the NME BRAT Awards in 1999. It was at this point that the guys all quit their day jobs and made Shynola their main occupation.
Since 1999 the boys from Shynola have been busy making some of music’s most groundbreaking videos. On the strength of their previously minimal work, Shynola was put in charge of the next video for DJ Shadow’s side project Quannum and the song “I Changed My Mind.”
“We were lucky enough to be offered the video without actually having done a music video before.” Jason says of the work for Quannum.
“After we had completed that video, we were suddenly music video directors.” Eventually Shynola worked their way into the opportunity of a lifetime—when they directed the video for Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song.”
“‘The Pyramid Song’ video pushed us to the limits of our abilities at the time,” says Chris. “We were just four kids in our bedrooms and we were making things up as we went along.”
The video landed Shynola their first NME BRAT award in 2002 for Best Video and all members of Shynola feel strongly about the work they did.
“From a personal, working point of view ‘Pyramid Song’ stands out because we worked terrifically hard on something where we aimed beyond our abilities and actually came out with a very pleasing result,” says Kenny. “It was a very enjoyable time making that video and these days I find myself trying to recreate such enthusiasm in myself.”
Being bona fide video directing gurus post-“Pyramid Song,” Shynola began working with notable artists like Steven Malkmus and Morcheeba. Their highest profile recent music videos were for the Junior Senior track “Move Your Feet,” and the Queens of the Stone Age song “Go With the Flow.”
“‘Go With the Flow’ is our most complex video to date,” claims Chris. “We started by painting the band black and standing them on the back of an old Chevy pickup. We shot them on Hi-def video against a green screen and then began a grueling post production process of keying them out, tracking the camera moves and creating a virtual environment for them to drive through.”
The hard work paid off as “Go With the Flow” brought home an MTV video music award for Best Special Effects in a Video in 2003.
“‘Move Your Feet,’ by comparison,” says Chris, “was a very simple process. We used an old Amiga program called deluxe paint, drawing the animation pixel by pixel with the mouse. It was a lot more straightforward than the Queens of the Stone Age video, but it was still hard work.”
As one would expect, the Shynola guys are enjoying their current successful creative run. “It’s good fun,” Chris states. “Most people working in this business do so because they love music and/or videos.
There are always a few people at record companies that just see videos as adverts for songs, but most people want to produce something new and interesting.”
What about the music video business? Do directors have total creative freedom or do the bands call the shots?
“We have chased bands before but it doesn’t really work that way,” Kenny says. “Music labels have marketing ideas and strategies and you are picked if you fit into those schemes. Sometimes bands are aware of us and ask for us specifically, but more often than not they simply have no idea who we are and the video commissioner for their label will contact us as well as five or more other directors.”
Getting a video made can be a highly rigorous process and working with musicians can be painstaking. “The bands tell you what they want in two ways.” Kenny tells it like it is.
“One: they write the song. This is obviously the biggest influence on any writing of ideas. Two: they choose your pitch or they do not. It’s an unfortunate process but invariably you are pitching against other directors. If you do not produce an idea that they want to see, your efforts are rubbished in an instant and all your work is scrapped, unpaid. That said, it is a far more preferable process than letting the musicians come up with the ideas and tell you what to do. Musicians make music, Video Directors direct videos.”
The guys at Shynola, like the rest of us, enjoy watching music videos too, but feel, as Kenny puts it, “the majority of music videos are bland, so are the majority of car designs, the majority of TV programs, and the majority of anything.” One video that Kenny likes is for Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker,” directed by Chris Cunningham.
“I am a fan of smart-arsed editing so I would have to say that ‘Windowlicker’ is my favorite video that we haven’t done. Generally, whenever Michel Gondry comes out with a video it is met by a loving expletive from me.”
Next on the agenda for Shynola is another short film probably, and then maybe a feature. Thankfully, they definitely will be making more music videos, and according to Jason, “watching movies, reading comics, seeing bands and sleeping.”
Check out Shynola on the web at shynola.com
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