Nine Music Videos Every Photographer Should Watch

Before I came to photography I studied film and the moving image, and I have never really shaken it off. A music video is a strange little form — three or four minutes, no dialogue to lean on, and it has to say something before the song ends.

Which makes it almost exactly a photograph’s problem, stretched out.

So this is not a countdown. It is nine videos that each solve one visual problem so cleanly that the solution transfers straight into a still frame. Watch them with the sound down if you want to be really unkind about it.

1. Thriller — Michael Jackson

Directed by John Landis. Fourteen minutes, when videos were three, and shot like a film because Landis was a film director who did not know he was supposed to be making an advert.

What to steal: the establishing shot. Before anything happens, you are told where you are and what the weather is doing. Most weak photographs skip that job entirely and drop you into a close-up of nothing in particular.

2. Ashes to Ashes — David Bowie

Directed by David Mallet. Reportedly the most expensive video anyone had made at the time, and it is spent on colour rather than spectacle — a solarised, poisoned palette that makes an ordinary beach look like a different planet.

What to steal: colour as the whole idea. Not colour as decoration. The sky in that video is wrong on purpose and it tells you more than the words do.

3. Take On Me — A-ha

Directed by Steve Barron. Live action rotoscoped into pencil sketch, thousands of frames drawn by hand.

What to steal: the value of one hard edge. The sketched world reads instantly because it is nothing but line. Squint at your own photographs and see whether anything survives that treatment. If nothing does, the composition is mush.

4. All Is Full of Love — Björk

Directed by Chris Cunningham. Two robots, white on white, and somehow the tenderest thing on this list.

What to steal: high key done properly. Almost the whole frame sits in the top third of the histogram and it still has form, because the shaping comes from tiny gradations rather than shadow. Very hard. Worth studying.

5. Around the World — Daft Punk

Directed by Michel Gondry. One set, one circular track, and each group of dancers assigned to one instrument in the track. When you hear the bassline, you watch the bass dancers.

What to steal: repetition as structure. A row of identical things is one of the strongest compositions available and it costs nothing — railings, pier legs, deckchairs, fence posts.

6. Here It Goes Again — OK Go

Directed by Trish Sie with the band. One continuous take, four treadmills, and a fixed camera that never moves.

What to steal: a locked-off frame with the movement inside it. The camera does nothing and it is riveting, because everything has been arranged to happen within one rectangle. That is exactly what you are doing on a tripod.

7. Weapon of Choice — Fatboy Slim

Directed by Spike Jonze. Christopher Walken dancing through an empty hotel lobby.

What to steal: one person, one large empty space. The scale of the room is the joke and the point. Most people photograph a figure too big in the frame; this is the argument for the opposite.

8. Teardrop — Massive Attack

Directed by Walter Stern. A singing foetus in a womb, which sounds ridiculous and is quietly extraordinary.

What to steal: warmth as an emotion. The whole thing is one colour temperature, held without wavering, and that single decision does the entire job of making it feel safe.

9. This Is America — Childish Gambino

Directed by Hiro Murai. Cut to feel like one unbroken take — there are joins, hidden well — and the real story is happening behind the dancing.

What to steal: the background is not a background. Check the far side of your frame before you press the shutter, because that is where the second story lives, and viewers find it whether you meant it or not.

What they have in common

Not one of these is about the kit. Every single one is a decision made before anybody switched anything on: what colour, what shape, where the camera sits, what happens behind.

That is the whole of photography as well, and it is why I still watch these instead of gear reviews.

There is a companion piece on the five techniques themselves if you would rather have the how than the what.