Dancer of the Night · 11:34pm Feb 17th, 2017
Every time I enter in the WriteOffs, I say I'm never doing it again. WELL I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
Anyway, is a short story less artistic just because it's short?
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
- probably not by Hemingway
Deceptively, this isn't about flash fiction. It's about... music videos. 
Music videos are just fun things to look at, to go along with a song. If you want to be remembered over the years, you could try to be artistic. Usually that means turning the music video into a short film that tells a story. See just about all of Michael Jackson's videos, or the recent hit Shelter.
They're still really impressive. Yet I can't help but feel it gets a bit pretentious. Sure, it's easy to turn a song into a short film when you have a huge budget and hire John Landis or Martin Scorsese as director. Or a Japanese animation studio (Hayao Miyazaki animated a famous music video as well). It's pretty obvious to call these "art" when no one will disagree. Look at all the effort and fancy effects!
I think minimalist techniques get easily ignored.
Here's one of my favorites, check it out. "Dancer of the Night" by Sakanaction, about 5 minutes long.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AozElbRnTM
oh rats, Japanese music copyrights are very strict. It's very likely you'll need a proxy site to view it in your country. go do that, it's worth the extra step.
the lyrics are difficult to translate, but you don't really need them here.
It starts with a Very Wide Shot of the band in a field in front of Mt Fuji. You notice their clothes, their instruments, the dancers. This scene could exist anytime in history, perhaps in the Edo period. A strange anachronistic theme going on here, like they're a time-traveling band. As the song plays, the camera slowly zooms closer. Not in the way you might think, but by using different takes recorded with cameras in different positions at different times of day.
There's an noticable time lapse with the mountain in the background, and a noticable distance lapse with the grass in the foreground. The band itself is swaying back and forth, but you aren't noticing them because it's just noise. You're watching the 2 dancers, aren't you? Their dance routine is just complex enough that you can follow its continuous motion between cuts. This creates the illusion that the whole band is moving unbroken. They're all immune to the jumps in time and space around them.
It's a clever gimmick to make the zoom-in feel smooth, even though it's totally obvious that it's not. No fancy special effect needed, just some smart editing and extra effort to film all those takes.
Then it goes one step further at 1:43. Day snaps to night, and the band is lit only by flashes of colored light. Fun in a psychedelic way, and breaks up the pattern. Now the background can switch between day and night at will. And it still hasn't stopped zooming in. At 2:55 the song climaxes during the full close up shot, and the perspective resets to where it began. Faster this time, switching up the pattern. We even get some in-between shots at twilight. Two gimmicks put together, just something fun to look at.
Beginning at 3:24 it finally breaks out of the pattern. We get shots of the musicians as individuals, each in a new location and perspective. And only here do we get the big twist. There's one more individual shot. One more character you didn't expect. A girl wearing a modern school uniform, holding binoculars... and for the first time we see electrical lines in the far distance.
The first 4 minutes of zooming were all from the point of view of this girl. All this shifting of time and space is put into question, because it wasn't what you thought it was. Satoshi Kon used something like this in his movies, putting the viewer into the POV of a character without realizing it, but not nearly this slow-burning.
66% of the baby shoes story is just an advertisement, before you understand the new context by the last two words. 80% of this video is just a few fun visual gimmicks combining until you understand there's an unseen character interacting with it.
This entire video certainly takes place NOW, in the PRESENT. That previous sense of timelessness is broken forever. She observed the quantum system and it collapsed in front of us.
I found it so poignant that these gimmicks and simple jump cuts could achieve all that. this is the type of art I can't get enough of.
or maybe this is all a stretch, and you don't see any of this yourself? heh, who knows! maybe I just wanted to show off a cool song and video to people. 
no i totally get it. I definitely couldn't put it into words like that, but I'm really glad you did?
I don't know that I can follow that theme along any lines, though. The feeling that you describe here doesn't have any mental indexes associated with it – I've definitely run into it before, but it's in a really weird spot where it's not the memorable part of anything.
(Also yes, it's a really good song.)
Huh. I'm the exact opposite. Every time I miss a Writeoff, I say I'll make it next.
It's a never ending cycle. :P
4435778
Clearly you two are rubbing off on each other.
4439940
How could ya tell?