PLAY ON!
Temasek Polytechnic's Interactive Media Design department presents their students MTVs in conjunction with ZOUK and MTV.
Cheekily titled "PLAY", the event was hosted by MTV's Nadya Hutagalung and two of the students from Temasek's Visual Communication class. The event itself was simple enough : some blabbing about the next video, and then the video plays. This was the routine for all 11 videos screened that night. It was dissapointing that most of the student directors who went up to explain what their video was about were almost too soft to be heard, or couldn't be seen due to a huge shadow cast upon the stage by some of ZOUK's pipe-like decorations, but after watching their videos, you definitely understand where they come from.
Most of the videos were definitely good enough to be played on MTV in my opinion, and the event was defintely a signal to the industry that finally, Singapore has enough creative directors to produce our own MTVs.
Highlights of the night were Concave Scream's "Erase" which was directed by Royston Tan who incidentally showed off three other videos during the show. Royston was the kind of person who "spoiled the market" because he even cut an extra video for the song "Eternity" by Lee Synergy with what looked like scraps from the Concave Scream shoots(that would be questionable to the meaning of the video). But it obviously shows that he lived and breathed videos.
The video itself conveyed the message clearly with the dark angst-ridden images found in most of Concave Scream's songs and you easily see why it won second prize at this year's short film festival.
Another interesting video was Force Vomit's "Spacemen over Malaysia" which was directed by Shikin Buang. It was so campy it was really funny because she tried to recreate an alien invasion of a Malay family intercut with shots of the band playing their instruments in a kitchen or something. Of course there was lots of "homemade" costumes and effects like flying hamburgers for spaceships and aliens which look like humans except for a silver cloak. But it was a fun video to watch. My only complaint is that the band wasn't in sync with the song when they appeared, but I suppose they had their reasons for doing that.
So , if you are wondering when Singapore would ever have its own crop of music videos with the recent increase in productions from Indonesia, I would safely say that the time is now! Let the videos play on...
- GrEg
