This morning I saw Kanye West’s new video for All of the Lights and there was something I noticed.
Here is the title sequence for Enter The Void by Gaspar Noé.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPxgi-PiNFE]
Now watch Kanye West video at 0:58.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAfFfqiYLp0]
Enter the Void isn’t a movie a lot of people will have seen, so people will think Williams has come up with something original. Hype Williams supposedly said he was inspired by it, but to me it looks like he just copied it, which is disappointing.
What’s the big deal? Design is inspired by design, especially when applied in a new form. (Title sequence to music video). So based on your logic, everyone that’s ever used a drop shadow on text are unoriginal copycats, along with everyone who has featured the Arial and Helvetica font in their print, web or motion graphics. How about chair design? How dare all those people copy the 4 leg and 1 back rest design. Damn copycats! Back off on Hype. He isn’t claiming to be original but he does have a great sense for setting the theme and overall composition. Give him that much credit.
There is a difference between copying something and just using it as inspiration. The title sequence to Enter The Void was so original that it won awards.
The thing is that Williams did not only use the strobe effects, but the various fonts as well, it’s just copying instead of something new and creative that’s done with that original idea. You could compare it to sampling a song by a hip hop artist. You can take one break, loop it and leave it at that. There is not a lot of originality with that, but if you cut it up, rearrange it to make something new, then you are inspired by the original, but make it something which is your own.
I don’t say that I think Hype Williams is a bad director. He made some of the most visually stunning videos there are and you will always be able to recognise his work. Of course he has also used movies as inspiration (for example Nas, 2Pac/Dr.Dre, Lil’Wayne and Busta Rhymes videos) and I’m fine with that, but here it’s something which was so unique that I didn’t feel that it was inspiration, but copying.
Man.. gaspar noe isnt that original either.. I should tell that in part some of the graphics i see in noe’s work i believe were inspired by Abel Ferraras New Rose Hotel title credits.. so .. not a big deal anyway.. lovely vids both of them and lovely movies both of them…
Never heard of that one, will try to check it out. Thanks for the comment!
… I know this thread is old, but I did the title seq for New Rose Hotel. It’d be nice to think that it had some influence, but I think the multi-language thing is a pretty obvious cyberpunk theme.
If they put random non-real Japanese words in katakana font because they couldn’t afford the Japanese kanji fonts, then I would agree that it was directly influenced, lol. Man, that film brought back memories. crazy post production. politics and drama.
Nice to hear, could you share some of those stories? Have you worked on any other movies?