>>PREVIEW
5TH ANNUAL INDIE MUSIC VIDEO FESTIVAL
Saturday, June 17
Broken City
The music video is dead, long live the music video!
An issue of Heavy Metal Magazine, circa sometime in the very early ’80s, ran a lengthy editorial on the advent of a new artistic medium, one that was supposedly poised to recalibrate pop culture forever.
The piece made music videos sound like the biggest thing to hit media since television itself, a pop renaissance pioneered by David Bowie and Culture Club. What the article failed to predict, however, is that, like all things great, this new frontier would eventually succumb to rampant commercialism and the resulting soul-crushing banality endemic in our society.
While once the fusion of music and video seemed to herald the beginning of something great, music videos largely lost their creativity. The great directors like Spike Jonze graduated to feature films and innovation went into remission. Today, the frequency of the videos themselves is going into remission. Airtime on MTV and MuchMusic is now largely devoted to reality shows about Jessica Simpson, forcing video programming into the margins.
Consequently, record labels are growing increasingly wary of commissioning directors to make videos. After all, why invest money in a video that may never see airtime?
Is the medium dying? Not according to local video director Joel Jackson, whose latest project is showing in the Indie Music Video Festival at Broken City. He says the industry is becoming more grassroots.
Jackson shot "Angry Mothers" for Vailhalen on a budget of $35 (not, of course, including a few thousand worth of gear accumulated over time). Jackson used a rented camera to shoot the video, and then cut it in his spare time. Add three drops of blood, sweat and tears and you have a glimpse of where the industry is headed.
"You used to have Much and MTV and that was it," says the ambitious Calgary director. "Now you have the Podcasts. There is a lot opening up. Even when you don’t have this giant marketing machine, you can still make a decent looking video cheaply."
Today you can buy a video off iTunes for $2, a sign that creativity in the industry will live on, just in a different format, according to Jackson. It is the age of do-it-yourself media, but it is not easy.
"It’s so hard to work a day job and do these things. It essentially took a year and a half," says the 30-year-old Alberta College of Art and Design graduate.
He also expects a great deal of creative talent to emerge on the scene in the city.
"I think it’s a good time to do anything in Calgary. We’ve got the country’s attention and talented people who have toiled for so long. There is a collaborative spirit," Jackson says. "Our music scene is phenomenal… and people from the east coming here has changed the atmosphere for the better."
Jackson is the only Calgary director with a submission in the North America-wide festival, which will be at Broken City on Saturday, June 17. The Indie Music Video Festival begins at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free. |
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