Unsigned British band does surveillance art
Monday, May 12th 2008, 23:40 UTC Published in in English, internet, link tips, notes, technology, video | 2 Comments
I generally find music videos with bands miming songs to be depressing nonsense. An exception to this rule is made by The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band with their video for a song titled “Paper” (link to higher quality Youtube video).
By cleverly taking advantage of The United Kingdom’s groundbreaking pioneer work in making a real life version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, they extremely cheaply recorded themselves using surveillance cameras in public places. The band managed to obtain some of the recordings by leaning on UK’s Data Protection Act and to cut a well working (to the extent that a video of someone miming can “work”) music video out of it. (Embedded flash video below).
If nothing else, their charts on Last.fm may look different a week from now, as of 2008-05-12 23:07 UTC the total play count of The Get Out Clause is 414.
[via:BoingBoing]
(Multi-purpose surveillance image borrowed from Wikipedia.)
May 16th, 2008 at 15:24 (#)
They cheated loads: half of the stuff wasn’t even filmed on cctv! See here: http://observers.france24.com/en/content/20080516-hoax-cctv-video-get-out-clause-clip
May 16th, 2008 at 15:46 (#)
Having to scrape together extra material due to cctv operators not carrying out duties assigned to them by law isn’t exactly cheating, is it? :P
As stated in the article you mention, one would hardly expect journalistic integrity from artists… in fact I don’t generally expect anything from something as stupid as music videos based on people miming to songs, which is why I found this particular piece and it’s potential statements interesting in the first place.
EDIT: I just had a look at my server logs, and it seems that the author of the above comment dropped in here from a Google blog search, and unsurpisingly some of the other listed blog entries about this music video have received identical comments.
The author appears to be a real person behind a French IP and a user of Firefox on Windows. Someone’s got some time to burn it seems.