Some Class

Posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007. Filed under Music.

South African music videos, or, rather, music videos from South African bands, are notoriously shite. With the odd exception, they are usually shot using the drummer’s mother’s camcorder, are edited by the lead singer’s sister and feature one of her hippie friends running around on the beach in Durban. That sort of thing. The height of creativity for SA music videos is the camcorder operator shaking the camera around a bit while filming the lead singer tearing his hair out, sitting on his bed and pretending to sing.

Now I know what you’re thinking, and I accept that in general our bands just can’t afford quality videos. But the few who can have not produced anything better than described above and the reason the rest of them don’t have money has more to do with the fact that they are rubbish as musicians and less to do with the “kak local industry.”

But recently, thank god, we’ve started to see some quality creeping into the local music video industry, thanks to some highly talented individuals who have decided to stick around in South Africa instead of pissing off to first world countries to make advertisements.

The Springbok Nude Girls video for ‘Illuminate’ was a solid piece of work – produced by Star Productions, who are now working on the reunited Nude Girls’ next video single.

Lightning Type also had a rad video for their song ‘Mercy’, produced by Room 5 in Johannesburg.

And I have just finished watching the best music video ever to come out of South Africa, in my humble opinion. It’s for the song ‘As Long As I Am Here’ by Prime Circle, remixed for the latest Cafe D’Afrique compilation.

It was directed and produced by Morgan Dingle, stars Tanya van Graan and was shot by Willie Nel. Witness a music video the way they should be done.




Being South African and strapped for cash is no longer any excuse for mincing out mediocre horse-shit. Prime Circle and the Nude Girl’s latest videos are proof that we have mad skills available locally. Now if only our television stations would get with the programme (‘scuse the pun) and show these videos instead of Paris Hilton’s latest turd.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Hey we are a small but fiercely creative production house.. we want to do high quality cutting edge videos for local bands, please check out our site and reel and contact us - lets put something out there guys!

    peace
blog comments powered by Disqus