THE University of Newcastle plan to become a regular producer of music videos after they unveiled their clip for Australian rock band The Living End's next single.
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The animated video for the track Not Like The Other Boys was conceptualised, filmed, animated and edited by 40 Bachelor of Visual Communication Design and Bachelor of Communication students and will be officially released on July 1.
On Friday the completed video was screened for the first time to students.
The opportunity to produce a video for one of Australia's biggest rock bands was made available after the university's head of School of Creative Industries, Professor Paul Egglestone, reached out to Heath Johns, the Australian music executive from The Living End's label, BMG. Mr Egglestone said he believes it's an Australian first for tertiary students.
"What we're trying to do is move the school in what we call work-integrated learning, where people are working on real life projects with real life companies, and in this case, a real life band that has a real life record company and management team behind them," Mr Egglestone said.
BMG Australia boasts artists like Peking Duk, San Cisco and The Cat Empire on their roster and Mr Egglestone is hopeful Newcastle students will continue working with the record company.
"This is the first step and hopefully I'll come back in a couple of months and say we have a formal partnership with BMG and we're going to develop this as part of our normal modus operandi," he said.
The video was shot by students in the university's production studios at Callaghan in January, which included filming The Living End.
The footage was then "rotoscoped" which involves tracing the live action by hand and then animating it.
Honours student Reid McManus was the co-director of the clip and said the video's main theme of people unzipping themselves to expose different layers underneath was inspired by the old Bugs Bunny Loony Tunes cartoons.
"The song is all about being different, but we're all the same people, so we wanted to show that by unzipping to be different people inside one another," McManus said.
Josh Leeson
Josh Leeson is an entertainment and features journalist, specialising in music, at the Newcastle Herald. He first joined the masthead in 2008 after stints at the Namoi Valley Independent and Port Stephens Examiner and has previously covered sport including the Asian Cup, A-League, Surfest, cricket and rugby league.
Josh Leeson is an entertainment and features journalist, specialising in music, at the Newcastle Herald. He first joined the masthead in 2008 after stints at the Namoi Valley Independent and Port Stephens Examiner and has previously covered sport including the Asian Cup, A-League, Surfest, cricket and rugby league.
