Kanye West continues to release singles from his 2008 808s & Heartbreak album with this video for track 11 – Coldest Winter. Reuniting to work together again, Kanye and Nabil elderkin have produced a music video that is fitting for the song’s lyrics and mood. The CG uses a Frank Miller comic style to produce a haunting world of dead trees, fog and snow. The smoke effect of the girl’s face is particularly impressive (00:15).

Spike Jonze, director of upcoming movie Where the Wild Things Are, recently teamed up with Kanye West to produce this experimental short film entitled We Were Once A Fairytale. It features a drunk Kanye stumbling about a club making a fool of himself and eventually ending up alone with a knife, which he uses to cut free a rodent-like demon from his stomach. He then passes the rodent a knife to kill itself.

What is interesting about the piece is that it was shot before the Taylor Swift incident at the VMW awards, where he stormed the stage and ruins Taylor’s moment. He does the same thing throughout this film. And what is the meaning behind the creature at the end? Does it represent his acknowledgment of his big ego and his desire to kill it?

The film is very well shot, often shifting in and out of focus which helps establish the drunken mood of the sequence, and the animation style of the rodent works well with the change of background music at the end.

Heartless was a huge hit for Kanye West, a highly experimental use of auto-tune, but this acoustic version by The Fray gives the song a totally different feel and is accompanied by a music video with a befitting level of quality.

Set in a classroom, it features a boy whose doodles in his exercise book come to life and tells the story of his heartache for a girl sitting at the front of the class. The storytelling is strong in both the animation on the pages and in the classroom scene. The director does well to choose shots that show the boys hurt, like the close up of his eyes which cuts to a shot of the girl in slow motion (01:35), it is almost as though she makes time slower and more agonising for him. All the while his sketch of a human heart travels across his pages getting battered and bruised by imaginary monsters and hazardous terrains, amongst his algebra calculations. The highlight of the post-production is when the band are visible on a scrunched piece of paper falling to the floor (02:35).

One of Nabil’s less experimental video directions, but again he proves he understands the rhythm of a song and matches it with something visually relevant. It’s nice to see Rihanna back in the public eye after her ordeal, in this werewolf-horror style production.

Kanye West’s latest music video shows a new craze in the video world- “Datamoshing”. With the removal of certain keyframes and tweaking to the compression, some very clever effects are created. When Kid Cudi comes into the shot while singing the chorus at 01:05 and the green glow of Kanye’s top at 03:26 it proved to be something fresh. The director, Nabil Elderkin, who has done videos for other music artists, is definitely someone to watch out for in the future. Another of his videos, “She’s a Star” by Will.I.Am, is a must see, especially as it is black and white, yet he manages to pull off some beautiful effects.