If you wade deep enough into the mind-numbing tide of the music video genre, you will eventually find passionate, talented, and cynicism-free people producing innovative films for interesting musicians, cool events, and good causes.

As proof, we offer the following seven productions featured in The Stash Permanent Collection during 2019 and listed here in chronological order from the date of publication.
 
 

K/DA “POP/STARS”
STASH 133

Director Arnaud Delord at Fortiche in Paris: “Riot Games wanted to offer its fans a K-Pop present for the League of Legends Worlds Finale held in South Korea.

“Visually, their main references were obviously K-pop music videos but also references from Gorillaz and other graphic video projects.

“The main technical challenge was the animation which was all done with keyframes. We wanted the girls to have as much charisma and energy as possible so we did not want to use motion capture.”
 
 

THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS “GOT TO KEEP ON”
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Executive producer Claire Stubbs at Partizan in London: “This was an open brief, so directors Michel and Olivier Gondry worked with the band to develop the idea together.

“The creative challenge was to find the right balance between real and fake during the progression to the CG shots. It needed many tries and failures. Too fake too early was not working – we needed to stick to some kind of reality and get stronger as we went.

“The biggest technical challenge was time. There are over 70 shots with effects so we couldn’t spend more than a few hours on most of the shots.”
 
 

MITSKI “A PEARL”
STASH 134

Saad Moosajee, director/animator in New York: “The biggest technical challenge was managing the workload of essentially creating two videos. There was a 3D version of the video that is fully colored, lit, and rendered that I produced entirely on my own.

“This first version was then used as the footage to be printed out and drawn onto. This is how we achieved the look of the finished video: drawing over all 1,480 frames of it.”
 
 

LIL DICKY “EARTH”
STASH 135

Federico Heller, director at 3DAR in Buenos Aires, Argentina: “David Burd (aka Lil Dicky) had a very clear idea what every animal should be like but the big challenge was the need to their personalities right away because each animal has only three seconds in the video.

“So, from the character design standpoint it was kind of like designing a logotype, they had to be impactful, concise, and produce the desired impression right away.”
 
 

ED SHEERAN “CROSS ME”
STASH 136

Dominic Alderson, CG lead at MPC in London: “It’s not often we get a project like this where the behind-the-scenes of motion capture is featured so prominently in the final product.

“In that sense, this was a brilliant opportunity to show people how we make so much of what we do. The director Ryan Staake had ambitious intentions for the finished project and being able to help with early input at the storyboard stage allowed us to make them possible in the short production time frame.”
 
 

BEARDYMAN “6AM (READY TO WRITE) FT. JOE ROGAN”
STASH 137

The first third of Ian Pons Jewell’s music video for UK musician/comedian Beardyman is good fun but then at the 1:40 mark, the Electric Theatre Collective VFX crew turns it into one of the most intense Pinocchio parodies of all time.

Produced by Academy Films and filmed in Kiev, Ukraine, the video follows a narcotic-fueled young man through a day of excess and desperation while comedian Joe Rogan narrates from the daily routine of gonzo journalist/writer Hunter S Thompson.
 
 

CANIGOU “TAPE”
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Japanese director/animator Hideki Inaba, who jumped onto the Stash radar back in 2015 with his breakout “Slowly Rising” music video for Beatsofreen (see Stash 115), returns with a new video for Swedish duo Canigou showcasing his signature brand of hypnotic CG complexity.