Masquerade, as its name suggests, involves a character who disguises his sadness behind a mask in order to get through each day. Produced by Aziz K, a student at Academy of Art in San Francisco, he created a world made of cardboard for his character to live in, essentially setting a colourless and artificial backdrop, which is what one would expect in a life of sadness.

The pain the rag doll is feeling is shown through his body language, and works well in painting one picture to the audience, and a separate picture to the other rag dolls as they only notice his happy-face mask (01:20).

As with all of Nabil’s work, what initially looks like a random montage of video miss-edits turns out to be a unique, well-timed and original composition of photographic and vector graphic shots.

Perhaps what stands out the most in his latest video, T.I.A (This is Africa) by the artist K’naan, is the sense of depth he has created though out the sequence. At any one point during the duration of the feature there are at least three levels of action, sometimes four or even five, with the foreground images casting a shadow on the background. And to stretch the depth further, a photographic footage in the foreground will seamlessly turn into a vector graphic in the background (01:01).

See Nabil’s other videos here and here.

Great effort must have gone into this stop-motion music video for Rex the Dog’s Bubblicious and it has truly paid off. The concept of the video is brilliant- it almost works as a tutorial to make your own dog. The animator creates the character from cardboard and glue and makes its mouth sing along with the song. With the addition of eyes, and a stage with speakers the tutorial video progresses into a full on music feature, with lighting effects and more extravagant character movements.

There is some significant camera positioning which gives authenticity to the characters and scene- A close up of the singer’s mouth with a shadow of the dog bopping his head to the beat in the background (01:53) and the introduction of the disco ball with the camera attached above (02:16), are two examples.

Eminem’s new video for forthcoming single 3 AM. Good horror movie look and feel, and some nice screen interference effects that appear in time with the beat.

Shot in one take, audio recorded at the same time as filming- an incredible feat achieved by director Chadd Harbold and director of photography Adam Newport Berra.

The musicians in the video are all friends or friends of friends that became friends. They all seem to appear from nowhere because we built a makeshift wall in the studio, which they would all have to run out of as soon as the camera was facing another direction.