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Not literally, I guess. But being short on budget and long on creativity, these videos prove that necessity is the mother of awesomeness. The sets and props of the first one, “You Don’t Want Yr Nails Done,” are made entirely of cardboard. (Warning: one naughty word.) Check it out:
This next video, “Thou Shalt Always Kill,” boasts a quadrillion or so hits on YouTube, an hilarious song, and probably took the better part of an afternoon to shoot. By the way, if you find it a little preachy, well, that’s the point:
Finally, here’s another humblingly brilliant and why-didn’t-I-think-of-that simple video by Michel Gondry, for Michael Andrews’ cover of “Mad World.” OK, the crane they put the camera on cost money, but that’s it:
Comments (8)
Comment
Apparently the Barenaked Ladies made the ultimate low budget video way back in the day. Canada TV had a booth that you could put a dollar (a dollar canadian, no less) in and get a minute of video recording that then might be featured on air as sort of a man on the street sort of thing. The BNLs all crammed into the booth, introduced themselves, plugged their gig that Friday, and played a minute long version of one of their song. Not only was it played as part of the man on the street segment, CTV put it into regular circulation of the other music videos they were playing. That one dollar video was played back to back with videos that cost many thousands of times that.
Now if only it was on youtube.
posted by c on 5-18-2007 at 8:48 am
I’m willing to bet the cardboard set for “You Don’t Want Yr Nails Done” cost $20,000 to build. Just because it’s cardboard doesn’t mean it’s cheap.
The Replacements had a video where it was nothing but a videotape of their record playing on a turntable. Even the sound was the audio from the record player in the video.
posted by Billy on 5-18-2007 at 10:36 am
yeah Panther! i saw the debut of this video during a live performance.
Panther is Charlie Salas from the Portland, Oregon band ThePlanetThe, and the video was made by Rob “Whitey” McConnaughy. link to whitey’s site above.
posted by mudi-b on 5-18-2007 at 5:36 pm
I’m suprised no one brought up the Ok Go! video. The whole video consists of the band dancing on four tredmills. Genius! One of the guy’s sisters came up with the dance. That’s pretty cheap!
posted by Sara on 5-18-2007 at 6:23 pm
check out the site…you will find a video of an obviously bored david bowie and mick jagger. i am seriously impressed that they made such a low-budget music video. at least…i hope it was low budget. primarily because they had to have done their own choreography.
anyway. nothing quite like two glorified celebrities pulling one over on the entire music community. it was at the point in both careers where everyone had to have been saying “oh…you want to do that? we will make it happen. no questions asked.”
at one point it appears that they could make out on the spot. be prepared.
posted by PT on 5-18-2007 at 9:44 pm
While the OK Go treadmills video might have been low budget, their video for “A Million Ways” had to be even cheaper. It was just the band dancing in their backyard doing another video choreographed by the same sister.
With that said, I wonder why no hilarious outtakes have ever come out of the treadmills shoot. No way they shot that on the first take!
posted by Kevin on 6-16-2008 at 9:55 am
For some reason, all of the videos are “no longer available” - what gives?
posted by dawn on 6-17-2008 at 8:27 pm
hmmm…and now they are ok. weird!
posted by Dawn on 6-17-2008 at 8:33 pm