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I really like the song and the effects/cinematography/tone are excellent.

However, it seems like a scaled back version of a more elaborate video... definitely feels like it's missing a third act.

         

Word.

This video is so bland. Why all the time and effort to shoot and create this....just for floating notes? Even the name "Soul Meets Body" holds so much potential.

         

i agree with captainmarc.

found myself thinking "cute" a few times.

         

What would happen in the third act?

         

This video totally blows. So you took the last few lines of the song and made that your idea? The video should complement the song is some way. This is another example of really lazy mainstream music video making that's out there. And it bums me out cause I liked Jon Watts.

         

see, i watched the whole thing but i didn't get they were notes - i thought they were sperms, like gaia (that's the goddess spirit of the earth) i thought they were gaia's sperms coming out and that makes sense with the end how they go to the sea, because the earth spirit can make love to the sea spirit at the beach.

so i really liked it when i thought that. but now that it has been explained to me by the really insightful posters above that it is about floating notes, i don't really like it as much because you can totally see how mainstream it is.

         

I liked it better on second viewing. Some ideas for the third act:

1. The kid who keeps the note in his jar was cool - maybe expand that into a mini story.

2. The band leaves the studio and drives around.... seeing the notes stuck all over the city.

3. The notes arrive at a giant organic egg and all try to penetrate it. One does, and the egg begins to divide and multiply into a giant fetus. Death Cab, armed w/ a giant coat hanger, abort this process; and then Kanye West comes out and says "George Bush doesn't care about a women's right to choose."

         

captainmarc22, you really need to be a music video director. I totally support the abortion idea. And it will make any band look like they care about "issues".

         

This video looks different than all the other mainstream stuff out there. It's sets a tone that totally matches the song. I give it four out of five clams!

         

What's if the notes exploded into spores at then end and the band breathed them in and died and a bunch MORE musical notes grew out of their corpses?

         

if the objective of the video was to be boring...then they certianly achieved that, how on earth did the label accept that pitch!

         

dickensian_hero - thoughts, rebuttals, behind-the-scenes anecodotes?

         

oh captainmarc, you old so and so. sometimes it feels like you're hosting a show called "antville". who are you anyway?

         

ha ha that's awesome.

We'll be right back.

         

I just don't get whats boring or dull about this video. Would you prefer that it feature the Monstar All Stars or something? Get over it. Not all videos can feature the Monstar All Stars. If the Monstar All Stars stole the powers of all the greates NBA players and then challenged Death Cab For Cutie to a basketball game all you'd be talking about is how that wasn't appropriate for the tone of the song. I know it's been almost ten years since we've seen the Monstar All Stars featured in a music video. I, more than anyone, would love to once again see them taking the rock to the hole. But this wasn't the right video for it so stop complaining.

         

i think waverly kinda sucks now. i haven't liked anything they've done since that fatboy slim video. this one is terrible.

         

they haven't really been the same since founding member jebidiah waverly died from exposure last year. i heard some of them went to south america to drink vinho de jurema and try to experience the first human thought. but i guess it hasn't helped. so far......

         

By the by, if any of you would like to know how to extract DMT at home, follow this link: www.erowid.org

DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen known to man, but to my knowledge its powers have never succesfully been harnessed for the making of better music videos.

i have given you the key. but only you can open the door.

         

Well, I know one antville poster who won't be invited to the Waverly early autumn mixer.

         

I still think Waverly is great, don't you agree, dickensian_hero?

         

I see this on mtvU all the time. Go Waverly! I guess.

         

Salad Fingers, your interpretation of this video is brilliant.

         

Plants are boring at the best of times...in a music video? those notes, digitally crap. boring performance in a log cabin...come on. Great band, love the postal service too. Just a shite video thas all. Waverely are on the wave.

         

this video is clever and simple- waverly are cool and are just hot right now- however the worst of their videos was the VHS/BETA video- Oh my lord...

         

I agree with Captainmarc that the cinematography and look of the video is just gangbusters. I liked Ben's wardrobe. He looks just my nephew Kenny, who is an associate professor at Wesleyan. Not like these Good Charolettes and Sum 41s dressed up like their going trick-or-treating. I thought that the video was more of an allegory for the state of society today as interpreted by someone with intimate understanding of Thoreau's ideas of transcendentalism. Bravo, Mr. Watts. Clearly a filmmaker who did simply roll off the assembly line of today's modern film schools.

         

Forgot my medication again...I meant, "Did NOT simply...well, you know.

         

Personally, I think this video is well done. It makes sense afterall. DCfC was on AOL Sessions, and Walla was talking about how music has become perfection to the extent of it becoming almost fake. In the recording, he didn't want to use pro tools like others because it perfected everything, almost to a fantasy state. Hence, its why you hear Ben breathing in the beginning of "I will follow you into the dark". Sooo, this relates to the music vid, because the notes are an abundance in the forest, with sounds everywhere. Natural sounds. As the story progresses into the city, notes get trapped, lost, and die. I guess they're trying to say how Music can die when its contained, and sold out aka when the boy traps the note and keeps it in a bottle. (ah, the resoluting idea) Music needs to be free, and spontaneous in order to survive reality.

         

in my book, when a video needs to be explained, that means it doesn't "work".

         

when there's some plonker walking through the woods in a tweed jacket, then it means its a crap video.

         

www.nytimes.com

Has anyone done crunched the numbers on how many directors from antville's golden era graduated to features?

         

Keith Schofield, Patrick Daughters: not yet Jaron Albertin: Weightless www.imdb.com Bernard Gourley: not yet Romain Gavras: Notre Jour Viendra 2010 www.imdb.com Martin de Thurah: not yet Encyclopedia Pictura: not yet Megaforce, Andreas Nilsson: not yet Nabil: ? David Wilson: ?

         

Congrats to Mr. Watts. I'll make sure to see his movies.

         

so basically none :(

         

Have you seen any features lately? Nothing too inspiring.

Although I do want to see Straight Outta Compton.

         

I'd fall on my knees and beg for a de Thurah feature, though.

         

All of the old school mv directors are still making features these days- Jonze, Glazer, Romanek, obviously FIncher...

Seems like if you got called up to the ranks from the 00s class, you were a Webb, Lawrence, Fleischer, not an antville darling.

         

Antville is too non-conformist, maybe. Our generation doesn't trust the machine/doesn't want to be famous. And likewise no one really trusts antville. You don't see them asking us all to be famous writers/directors.

         

I've had trouble fitting antville into the narrative of music video 'history' likewise. Someday I'd like to hear an outside perspective on what happened/is happening here.

         

As someone who came late to the party, I always felt like antville existed to document the weird period between MTV's decline (as a place for music videos) and Youtube's rise. It also coincided with the final wave of alternative rock music, which was the genre that antville generally rallied around.

It was a period when directors could pitch arthouse ideas to bands with arthouse sensibilities, and still have record labels pony up 100k+ budgets. I feel like the period started around 2001, with bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol (NYC Revival rock) reached it's peak around Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, and Franz Ferdinand in the mid-00s (I always refer to this period as "OC soundtrack rock"), and then tapered off in the late 00's when altrock hopefuls like MGMT, Neon Indian, Sleigh Bells, and Foster the People failed to deliver for major labels, and labels started doubling down on pop-centric music (somehere around 2010).

         

Cool.

I always housed antville in the same creative revolution as RES magazine (1997-2006). The art-house/weird era; and, yeah, the continuation of the 120 Minutes/indie sensibility.

The 'creative' thing, which even Kanye has talked about, kind of fueled a lot of art and maybe a little commerce.

Thanks for making things a little clearer there.

         

(The guy who ran RES now runs Flux, which has music video programs; and a recent art museum run.)

         

I wonder where all the commentators went?

         

They've fallen off, or find fulfillment elsewhere.