Hype Williams

Hype Williams is the first of quite a few music video directors that I will be looking at throughout my blog. He is an American music video and film director, he started off of course small and built himself up through the media world by presenting his work on local billboards, storefronts and playgrounds using the name 'HYPE' as a graffiti tag. 

A fair amount of his work includes shots like the aerial shot and tracking shots and his work is usually showcase/ performance based to set the audiences eyes on the artist as seen in 'Rock the boat' by Aaliyah or 'Only you' by Ashanti as seen above and below.

Hypes signature technique for music videos is said to be the fish eye lens which distorts the camera around the central focus e.g the artists, this is a good way of attracting the audience to the artist which is the main intention from the labels point of view anyway, helping the viewers to keep that certain image in their minds so sales in turn rises up. This can be seen in 'Gimme some more' by Busta Rhymes and in 'The rain' by Missy Elliott as seen above.

Hypes genre of music video tends to be based around the rap and rnb genres as he has made videos for the likes of artists such as Jay-Z, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj and Beyonce, although he has done videos for Coldplay and Christina Aguilera too. Below I will show the best videos that Hype has created for the mainstream artists. 

The first example of Hypes work is 'Big Pimpin' by Jay-Z which is a great example of showcasing as they use attractive women as sexual attractions to the audience.

 This is 'Golddigger' by Kanye West which could be considered as showcase and narrative at the same time as most of the lyrics do actually match the images shown.

 Finally this is 'Stupid hoe' by Nicki Minaj , not much can be said about this one although Hype has clearly stamped his name on the begginning of this video, from what I can see its a showcase video as it couldn't be a narrative as the images and the lyrics don't really make much sense, in my opinion this video would be classed under Hype's limitations.