Task 3 Continued - A Different Music Video Director.

Chris Cunningham.

Chris Cunningham was born in Reading and grew up in Lakenheath in Suffolk. He began his career working for the ITV satire programme “Spitting Image” working on the animatronics and puppet sculpture, from there he went on to do the same thing for the film Alien 3.
Stanley Kubrick then employed him in the late 90’s to work with the animatronics on the Film A.I. – a film about a robot child. Cunningham then left that project to pursue a directing career. His first music video was “Second Bad Vilbel” for Autechre, he also does a lot of work for Aphex Twin, having directed five of their music videos, and he also directed “All is full of Love” for Bjórk and “Frozen” with Madonna
Both Frozen and All is Full of love have a blue colour setting which shows that he likes to put effects in, “All is full of love” is also Bjórk as a robot making out with another robot, who is also Bjórk, from this we see that he likes to direct and produce rather strange stuff, but nothing is strange than “Rubber Johnny”. “Rubber Johnny” is an experimental film that started off as a short advert for Aphex Twin’s album, it has Cunningham in the starring role of a young Hydrocephalus mutant child, who is kept in a dark basement with only a small Chihuahua for company, this however evolved into a longer 6 minute short, involving a lot of special effects and it becomes apparent that his parents are slightly ashamed of him and thus he’s in the basement, every once in a while his head explodes, which is rather odd but apparently that’s one of Cunningham’s things.
Some audience responses towards Rubber Johnny are:
“As creepy as this is, it’s an excellently made video!”
“Fantastic video-clip...so goddamn strange, sick ‘n absolutelymind-fucking! Great work...praise the artist”
Cunningham has since done an advert for Gucci promoting the perfume: flora; some of the audience responses to this are:
“That's one of the most like-able ads I have seen in a long time.”
“Cunningham is a genius when it comes to atmosphere and mood.”
From these we can see that the audience appreciates his style but not necessarily its content, as he does make some really ground-breaking videos that people aren’t quite ready for.