Hiro Murai

Hiro Murai is a Tokyo-born filmmaker based out of Los Angeles who has worked with artists such as Donald Glover, Bloc Party and Queens of the Stone age in creating and directing music videos - and has made several adverts for companies such as Juicy Fruit chewing gum and Nokia.

His work is eerily minimalist and more story-focused: the videos are more like short stories than a platform for artists to display their talents. There is a seamless connection between realism and CG (as seen in the video above, where monsters are coming out of the woods to watch the little boy play).

One of my favourite videos by Hiro is 3005, performed Childish Gambino (Donald Glover). The video was created in one shot on a carousel. The lighting is soft and vibrant from the array of fairground lights - and features Glover lip syncing his rapping alongside a stuffed animal as it slowly begins to deteriorate.



Hiro Murai sticks closely with Andrew Goodwin's five key aspects:
Thought beats consist of abstract scenarios in which a star's image is advertised (All lead vocalists are visible in the videos- a sign of narrative and performance - though there is never any other signs of performance from the rest of the band members. Technical aspects of the video are always more complex than initially expected: for example in The Queens of the Stone Age's Smooth Sailing music video, there are animations of a smokey-eyed skull overlayed on a person in the video which look wholly realistic. Also, the handheld shots in the karaoke parts of the video are intesting examples of intertextuality of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (achieved with a snorricam).

More Web Research

In order to create a website for my own band, it is imperative that I specifically research one band hat sticks to the norms and conventions of a rock band, and who interest me. Creating a pretty website based on bands that I like is on thing - but it won't earn me the grades that I need if it can't be identified as a rock band.