I honestly don’t know who took after who (or who came first), but the new Kanye West music video for “Welcome To Heartbreak” features very similar transitions to those seen in “Evident Utensil” by Chairlift.
As you may remember, I wrote about Chairlift’s neat music video previously because it made use of the digital artifacts commonly seen in corrupt digital video downloads as a central theme to their music video aesthetic. And while this particular Kanye West music video doesn’t only use this effect, it is featured prominently throughout the video.
If you’ve ever download a video from the web, you’ve probably run into the problem of getting a corrupted or incomplete video file at least once. The result, when you try to play the file, usually ends up looking either very pixely or distorted with lots of digital video artifacts in between frames. In other words, it looks like the music video for “Evident Utensil” by Chairlift shown above.
The thing I love about this music video though is that it’s made so well to deliberately mimic the look of a corrupted file, so much so that I actually thought I was watching a badly uploaded YouTube video. But when I realized that the morphing transitions within the video were carefully constructed, I literally stopped everything I was doing and gave the video my full attention. I really want to know what they did to get the effect so perfect and realistic.
