Franz Ferdinand 'Take Me Out'
Franz Ferdinand frontman Alexander Kapranos explains the many and varied influences behind the '30s-style promo for second single 'Take Me Out'. Check it out here.
Franz Ferdinand 'Take Me Out' [Dial-Up] [Broadband]
"It's kind of two dimensional in a three dimensional style if that makes any sense. It's a montage of images; ourselves, pictures and things taken from other places and put together in a strange, abstract way. That's what gives the video that strange, jerky, style.
"The idea came out of stuff we'd been talking about as a band - we all like the photo montage style that you get from the DaDa artists who would literally cut up photographs and make new images with the pieces. You get this strange, disjointed look where limbs and heads aren't the same proportions. So you get a very jarring effect.
"We wanted to combine that with other ideas, like those old films from the 1930s that were directed by Busby Berkely; he would have these geometric shapes formed by dancers, chorus girls all making these fantastic shapes in water. But we wanted to take it further; he'd use the human shape to make these abstract shapes and we wanted to take it further by using limbs and arms and repeat them to make the human form even less human. So we have a lot of that in the video too, a lot of legs kicking in the air and arms moving to create that same sort of effect.
"Another sort of imagery that we liked was the kind you'd get in Russian film and propoganda posters, again from the 1930s, which had a kind of constructivist approach; everything was very flat and very geometric and you tended to have limited colours and very blocky styles. We wanted to combine those three styles, so there're a lot of concentric circles, geometric shapes and blocks moving around in time to the music.
"We were very lucky when we made the video 'cos we had all these ideas but we didn't know if it was possible to make a video like that or if it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds or something but fortunately we met a guy called Jonas Odell. Laurence from Domino knew him and thought he'd be interested in our ideas so we got chatting and he immediately got all the reference points and really liked them. We liked the other videos he'd done, we really liked his style and he said he'd love to give it a go. So he sent us a clip of how he imagined the video looking and we just looked at it and thought 'Wow this is fantastic, the guy's really tuned in'. It was really good fun, we sent lots of e-mails to and fro going through our ideas and how we'd follow them through. I think he did an amazing job, we were really impressed.
"Basically it's a pop video and it should entertain you, but not just once - there're certain things you stare at in life that are just fascinating to look at like a fish tank or an open fire, they're actually quite simple things but there's something fascinating about them. And I think pop videos should be like that too. There should be something there that just makes you want to come back and look at it."
Franz Ferdinand 'Take Me Out' [Dial-Up] [Broadband]
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