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budget, November 7, 2008 5:16:39 PM CET
Kanye West - Heartless (dir. Hype Williams)

         
Damn u budget, I was just about to post it. I like it. Only Kanye can Jedi Mind Trick Hype into doing something original
         
I half-way agree with you TF. Although I think it's more accurate to say that Kanye is probably one of Hype's few clients who wants something original and/or can afford to pay for something original.
         
-- and to go one step further, is the only one who seems to stop him from cheating the work. Hype fell off hard and is more or less running away with the money but Ye seems to keep him steady enough to actually complete things.
         
Lusk, I often wonder about Hype's output. My theory is that his best work came at a period in time when he was given adequate budgets to pull off epic videos. When budgets went down, I think Hype chose to still give record labels their money's worth, but nothing more. It seems like a lot of directors these days are more than happy to work twice as hard to make up for the fact that they're working with half the budget, but I feel like Hype put his foot down and simply gives the labels what they're paying for.

For instance, I'm sure that Hype's Universal Mind Control video could have looked like Blade Runner if Common's label could have afforded it, but I'm guessing they were working with a (relatively) smaller budget (remember that in his heyday, Hype was working with a million+ per video) and so they got something a bit more minimal, a bit less extravagant. In the end, the video is still a hit, the label is happy, Common is happy, Common's fans are happy, and everybody wins.

Some people might argue that he's a hack for not doubling his effort for his "art", but I think people forget that the finished video is just a product for a giant corporation. Hype doesn't need to get his "foot in the door" - he's already an established name that labels seem to love to work with- why should he slave over an underfunded commercial? He's not making Apocalypse Now, he's making a promo for a rapper that'll most likely be off the air in several months. Is it worth it for him to spend weeks working through the night on a stop-motion masterpiece?
         
If that's true, then I think its kind of sad.

This video is awful.
         
For a animated video, it still has alot of the Hype Williams angles and model poses, so I wonder if this a fully animated video or rotoscoped (e.g. A Scanner Darkly).


         
Vimeo
         
i dunno about the video as a whole, but those shots with wilma flintstone on the wall look like rotoscopy to me
         
It's almost a Ralph Baksh video.
         
Kanye, straight from his blog:

I DIDN'T LEAK THIS BUT AT LEAST HERE'S A CLEAR VERSION!
THIS VIDEO WAS ROTOSCOPED. WE RECORDED REAL PEOPLE AND THEN HAD 65 ANIMATORS IN HONG KONG HAND DRAW OVER EVERY CELL . INSPIRED BY THE MOVIE "AMERICAN POP" . HYPE SHOWED ME THE MOVIE AND I WAS SOLD.
         
65 slave animators in a sweatshop?
         
I think two companies did this together. one was in hong kong and the other in europe.
www.opticflavor.com
         
I think two companies did this together. one was in hong kong and the other in europe called optic flavor.