Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry

Film and music video director, Producer, Screenwriter, Animator

I wrote about Norman McLaren and how he experimented with image and sound, combined and synchronized animation with music.  Michel Gondry is a French film and music director who  in his videos is working with visualising sound and notes as well.

„Bass: athletes with small heads and big legs, because they are hysical, move constantly and have no time to think.

Guitar: sceletons, because they sound itchy.

Synthesizer: disco girls, because it sound feminine.

Vocoder: robots – it's obvious why.

Drum machine: Mummies. Please don't ask why.“

Gondry talking about the music video for the song Around the World by Daft Punk.

Michel Gondry could be considered as an contemporary video artist in the tradition of Oskar Fischinger. Fischinger's early artistic goal was to combine two of his great passions, music and the graphic arts.  Gondry himself works closely with musicians and creates visual parallels to the elements of musical form.  He said: "I looked at the rhythms, and I replicated an abstraction, which made my videos closer to what the musicians usually meant in the beginning. I could never be exact in my work, and that was a good thing."

For Piano Painting Gondry uses inspiration from his son's art class to make a device that creates shots of circularly spilling paint.  The device itself is attached to Björk's fingers that are playing the piano, and in that way the patterns that are made are directly depending of the notes that are played.  The visual effect that he gained that way Gondry used for the opening scene of his movie La science des revês.

Another very charming music video/animation is Fell in Love with a Girl (White Stripes) that Gondry made with his young son:

And this short animation Gondry made as a birthday present for his friend Karen, who likes to ride on her horse: