2017 was an incredible year for art, especially in film and music. We’ve decided to to make a short list of the music videos that had influenced our style and inspired us as they were released in 2017. You may see elements of these videos in the work we’ve produced ourselves over the past year.

Here’s Chromoscope Picture’s picks for the 2017 Chromie Awards.

We could write you a novel on why this is not only one of the catchiest songs of 2017, but also one of the best music videos – so we’ll attempt to summarize here.

An often overlooked single off of The Weeknd’s 2016 album “Starboy”, and shadowed by the much more popular title track music video, “Secrets” delivers on so many levels, but most importantly cinematography and color. A methodical and slow burning edit of a video, each shot is held for an almost uncomfortable amount of time, forcing you to soak in the longing stares of lust, desire, and missed opportunities that float just under the surface.

The video was filmed amongst the wide expansive corridors of the Toronto Reference Library. Featuring the best of late 70’s brutalist architecture, the concrete walls and blood red carpet offer the perfect color palette to compliment the wide and voyeuristic framing. For these simple yet effective reasons, it wins best cinematography.

Yep, two The Weeknd videos. If you know music videos, then you know the directing duo Alex Lee & Kyle Wightman, known by their namesake ‘BRTHR‘, or should I say their nmske.

Every BRTHR video should have a title card in the beginning with a warning for epileptics, because their visual and editing style is truly one of a kind. As filmmakers, we all kept wondering how their creative process works. Can you imagine giving notes on a rough cut? There are no ‘revisions’. When you hire BRTHR to make you a video you know what you’re getting yourself into, and when they complete a video they say “here you go”.

Their music video for The Weeknd’s “Party Monster” wins best editing, because we dare you to find a 2017 music video with a crazier edit than this one.

Having a character study following one character and a slew of supporting characters over the course of a six and a half minute song doesn’t sound like the most interesting music video in the world. Essentially, you need to have a compelling performance from the lead actor to draw in the audience. This is only made more difficult by the fact that you normally have no speaking moments in a traditional music video.

The War On Drug’s music video for “Holding On” takes the viewer/listener into a very real, very visceral world; one that many people end up in at some point in their lives. The video trades large set pieces and artist performance with a small vignette of a man’s life following the death of his wife. The lyrics may initially have invoked feelings of the ending of any relationship, but this video was intended to showcase the nuances in the aftermath of coming to terms with the ending of something beautiful, and showing that life can continue in the wake of major change and sadness.

The lead actor, Frankie Faison, has appeared in countless TV shows and movies, and is considered a well-seasoned actor (and the father of Donald Faison? Turk from SCRUBS? That’s wacky). Brett Haley, the director, was able to pull a convincing and powerful performance from Faison without the aid of compelling dialogue. The intimacies of the performances are only accentuated by the small town America set pieces; an old diner, a beat up pickup truck, a Gazebo on the side of a country road. Faison show’s a remarkable transformation from the uncertainty and fear in the beginning of the story, to a contagious smile in the Polaroid that finds itself nested in the frame of a picture taken many years ago. The juxtaposition showing that life can, indeed, go on.

Arcade Fire’s Disco inspired album “Everything Now” has been a polarizing release for sure, but we believe this to be their best work to date. The album is itself a concept album, centered around the idea that our modern world, with its infinite barrage of pleasures, has made life more bland and routine. These feelings and fears of a voluntary dystopian society can be found in works like Aldous Huxley‘s “Brave New World“, and this music video does an amazing job at capturing the themes in that work and others. The video showcases a sprawling desert landscape, devoid of adults and role-models, littered with the charred fuselages of burnt out rockets.

The enigmatic EN logo can be found everywhere across the abandoned desert towns, on the briefcases of the nameless 60’s-era drones as they make their way on the deserted highways, on the sides of the crashed space rockets.

It’s on the backs of the scientists sifting through the wreckage of the failed space ships.  The message of the album is not lost on the visuals of its stand-out track. When working in a vast expanse of space like a desert, what little action that populates it has enormous gravity in terms of telling a story or conveying an emotion. In “Everything Now”, this is a world where the endless desire and pursuit of Wanting Everything, Now has taken the adults from the children, leaving them to frolic in the desert, watch the ships launch from alien-like rock formations (invoking the visuals of Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy album artwork) and gaze to the stars and the sky while they wait for it to all come crashing down.

Alright, so we’re kinda cheating with this one. Point taken but, in our defense, The Lumineers kinda set this up for us. I mean, how can we resist a short film made up of music videos? This is, quite literally, our shit. Throughout the past year The Lumineers did a staggered release of these five music videos, over the course of which you learn they are small parts of a larger story about a woman and the different phases of her life.

The short film begins with “Ophelia”, a sort of prologue wherein the band is playing a show and lead singer, Wesley Shultz, experiences this out of body experience (these kick off each act of the story). He steps out of his body, and the situation, in a moment of reflection. See, “Ophelia” feels like a song about the band itself; their rise to fame and dealing with the changes that held for their lives. Wesley takes this moment of reflection and exits the show, and in a La La Land-esque scene, he proceeds to dance along the empty streets to the tune. This is one of my favorite parts of the film because it’s simple but impactful. The sound design; combining the song with the natural sound of the scene, and the way Wesley almost conducts the song with his movements, make this a really charming sequence and pulls you into the vision for the duration of the film.

 

“Cleopatra” begins as a pregnant woman rushes from her motel room. She knocks on the window of cab. The driver, we’ll call Cleopatra beckons her to enter. What follows is a super cut of passengers entering and exiting the back seat as the lyrics describe Cleopatra’s thoughts and feelings about where she’s ended up in life. There is a lot of regret. The lyrics really describe someone who believes they could have been so much more than what they’ve become; someone robbed by circumstance.

We love this kind of storytelling. The video reflects the lyrics, yes, but masterfully so; in that they don’t feed you the information through perfectly narrated scenes, but rather a couple of words to cue you into what is going through this characters mind. To us, the filmmaker perfectly captured the reflective inner monologue I’m sure we all experience during such menial tasks as driving. There’s a real understanding of humanity in this video that makes it so relatable.

 

“Sleep On The Floor” gives us our first true to form flashback, and a more visual representation of Cleopatra’s reflection. We open with a much younger Cleopatra driving again and with the same solemn look. In an instant we go back even farther in time to where her journey really began. She and her boyfriend runaway and embark on an epic road trip wherein we watch the couple jump from house to house and couch to couch.

The blending of music and sound is back, we see the band again, and we return to an upbeat tone as we watch Cleopatra fall in love on the road. The story ends on an uneasy tone as she lays down to sleep on the floor and we return to see here driving into the night. This vignette really shines with acting and directing. A simple concept brought to life by the honesty of the characters.

 

In “Angela”, we rendezvous with a pregnant Cleopatra somewhere in life between young lover and taxi driver. We’re driving solemnly again, but why so much driving? To me, it could be symbolic of the constant forward motion of life. The road… or not.

This story is the turning point of Cleopatra’s life. It seems that this is where she makes the decision that we see future-her second guessing, way back at the beginning of the film. There’s an uncertainty punctuated by shining moments of joy followed by immediate recoil of doubt. She seems uncomfortable in the routine of a normal life, and follows some kind of wanderlust in the end. Again, she’s always on some road to somewhere.

 

 “My Eyes” is the end of Cleopatra’s story and, fittingly, it is about her death. We see a much older version of her living out her days in a nursing home, and reflecting on her life. We see what she sees; short memories of a life that she feels she never got quite right, one that hardened her and made her into who she is. Now, Cleopatra does what she always has. She leaves; standing in the doorway, the lights go out behind her and she steps into the abyss.