"animation" in Weblog

When the JCB song video did the rounds a few weeks ago I was completely charmed. I watched it through several times, ordered the album and then spent a while browsing the Monkeehub website. That’s every marketing man’s dream! Not only did I buy the product I also spent time looking up others involved.

Now, I’ve bought albums based on videos before - I have a notepad that I carry around with me that has band names and song titles scrawled all over it, but I don’t think the experience has ever been this easy. Because I saw the video online, it was only a couple of short clicks to get everything I needed… Offline it’s more of a chore: I get distracted, something else comes along, whatever. This one medium approach is something I’ve never come across before.

Are we going to see more of this kind of thing? What is the audience of MTV2? I’m told it’s relatively small… The catch is that to flourish on the web either the song or the video have to be something special, so that rules out a lot of the major label signings. Monkeehub did an absolutely incredible job, perfectly matching the tone of both the music and the lyrics, and the song itself is great. I’m not such a fan of the rest of the album, to be honest, but my point is that the online promo did something I very rarely do: go straight out and spend my money.

I would dearly love to know how Nizlopi’s sales have done since that video started circulating.

My little bro has made it into the Computer Arts Graduate Showcase for the second year in a row. Despite only graduating once. I don’t really know how he qualified last year, only being a second year, but the good folk at the magazine seemed to like him! His second year film, Birdie, is up there in full and is well worth a look… Don’t take my word for it though… Keep an eye out for his third year film. It’ll be doing the studio rounds soon!