2007 Worldwide Short Film Festival's Scene Not Herd

Screening: Toronto's Cumberland Cinemas on June 14, 2007
Directed by: Various
Starring: Lily Allen, Jarvis Cocker, Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, MSTRKRFT, among others

Now that MuchMusic has shifted its focus away from music videos to raking in advertising dollars through reality show knock-offs and lowbrow tabloid programming, it's become harder for Canadians to see the latest vids by today's tastemaking artists and directors. And as the music industry continues to devour itself, the future of the music video remains somewhat uncertain. Although a few artists have tried to sell their clips through iTunes (Bjork and Justin Timberlake, for example), for the most part videos circulate online virally and are easily hunted down on YouTube or MySpace. The problem is, you have to know where to look.

This is where a music video program such as the Worldwide Short Film Festival's Scene Not Herd comes in handy. A mix of locally produced promos and international fare, the 16 featured videos this year run the gamut from delightful to totally insufferable. With a few exceptions, some of the videos that use animation, motion graphics and visual effects are out-done by equally low-budget, but more imaginative, live action fare.

Leading the pack of animated vids is Canadian motion graphics designer Emmanuel Ho's video "The Owl" for Austin, Texas' I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Essentially a fan video created independently and then circulated online last fall, "The Owl" shows a panicked raven tethered at the foot, desperately trying to fly toward a nearby window. Ho heightens the track's sense of dread and uncertainty by using simple, symmetrical shapes and a limited colour palette.

Unfortunately "The Owl" remains in a class all its own. Animated efforts for Kris Demeanor, Quasi and the inexplicably bad "Sta Passando Novembre" for Italian singer Eros Ramozzotti grind Scene Not Herd to a halt. The BravoFACT-funded "I Have Seen The Future" for Demeanor's weirdly perverse spoken-word song about tennis kicks off the program. Director Cam Christiansen starts off innocuously enough, with dot matrix-animated characters playing tennis along to the narration, but the video never moves beyond pointless slow-motion close-ups of its clunky characters.

The best live action Canadian efforts are Sean Michael Turrell's "Street Justice" for MSTRKRFT and London, U.K.-based Canuck director Jaron Albertin's beautiful "Dr. Blind" for Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton. "Street Justice" uses old school production values to pay tribute to televised disco parties from the '70s. Featuring break-dancing hipsters in kitschy clothes, lame "wipe editing" techniques from the '80s and hilarious shots of gold-spandex clad women cavorting in a playground, the video is a welcome blast from the past that ingeniously captures a bygone era that, ironically, stayed alive in the Canadian cultural consciousness thanks to the umpteen reruns of similar programming that MuchMusic used to air when it still had a sense of humour.

Anyone unnerved by the big box shopping experience should check out Albertin's "Dr. Blind," one of last year's best and most original videos. The director follows the Metric frontwoman as she pays a late-night trip to the pharmacist at her local Wal-Mart. While rifling through her purse, the lights go out and the store's ghostly customers appear in a single file line. Totally freaked out, Haines knocks one of them over, creating a domino effect.

Scene Not Herd also boasts some strong British work. Perhaps the best director working in the medium today is London-based Dougal Wilson, who's created memorable clips for Benny Benassi, The Streets, LCD Soundsystem and most recently, Bat For Lashes. His vid for Jarvis Cocker's "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time" brilliantly casts the gangly Brit-pop icon as a chatty London cabbie who's too busy giving advice to a jilted female passenger to notice that he's mowing down every pedestrian in sight.

Sarah Chatfield's "Alfie" for Lily Allen taps into the singer's larger-than-life media personae. Allen's rant about her useless little brother — played here by a badass puppet — is set in a colourful cartoon kitchen that mixes kids show production values with drug references and decidedly adult hand-gestures.

Rounding out the program are videos from Apostle Of Hustle, Constantines, TV On The Radio and the Scissor Sisters, among others.

If there's anything to be learned from these clips, it's that the medium still has the power to boost a band's cultural cache. But to do that, videos need to find an audience. Granted, Scene Not Herd isn't perfect and there isn't much new material here for those who spend their days surfing the web, but it's a good overview of recent talked-about clips for music fans who've lost touch with the medium.