Submarine Channel

Ever since the Great Music Video Renaissance of the late 1990’s, we have been celebrating our love affair with the music video in its many different forms and incarnations in a project called 2Pause.

Eons before Youtube, in 2000, we launched the online music video portal 2Pause – Freezing Music Video Culture. We must have featured around 1000 music videos since then. Each and every one of those touched our hearts or challenged our minds. But that’s all folks! As amazing a journey as it was, we have reached the point where we feel it’s time for a new adventure!

Our collection will remain online as a resource, but we will no longer be adding new content. And if you’re feeling like it’s the end of an era (as we are) or just a bit nostalgic, here’s our top 5 all-time favorite 2Pause moments:

1.    Launch of Pause in 2002

Not many remember, but 2Pause was born at the 31st International Film Festival Rotterdam 2002 as part of their Exploding Cinema program – an initiative of Submarine co-founder Femke Wolting. The first Pause website was a spin-off of an exhibition about music videos and featured clips by a small group of amazingly talented upcoming directors, such as Chris Cunningham, Roman Coppola, Mike Mills, H5, Shynola, Spike Jonze, Stephane Sednaoui, and many more. In retrospect, the late 1990’s till the early 2000’s proved to be one of the most interesting and creative periods in music video history.

2.    New website: 2Pause

Our Pause website lasted 7 years before it broke of old age. Not to mention that in the meantime progress made it possible to easily showcase and embed videos at a high quality. So we took a step back, regrouped, reorganized and came back in 2009 with a stronger, fancier new platform: Old Pause out. New 2Pause in!

3.    Interviews with directors

Over the years, we managed to build a dedicated group of followers, consisting of hardcore music video afficionados – many of whom were directors and animators themselves. Next, we started interviewing our favorite directors whose promos we featured on 2Pause. We published lots of written interviews as well as mini documentaries with the likes of Radical Friend, David Wilson, Ben & Julia, Edouard Salier, Daniels and Sverre Fredriksen (who did a beautiful animated music video for Tim Knol that we produced ourselves) to name but a few. We feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to pick the minds of these creators.

4.    Screening Programs

Truth be told, we’ve always felt some videos were too big for small screens, so we simply decided to carefully group them together and allowed them to shine in selected cinemas and festivals worldwide. Lowlands, especially, was a blast! And so the “New Psychedelica” (trailer above), “Documentary Music Videos” (screened at IDFA Doclab) and “The Future of Music Videos” screening programs were born.

5.    Lovie Award

It sure feels amazing when others appreciate what you do. In 2011 we received a golden Lovie for Best Music Website.

There’s simply no doubt we’ve had an incredible journey with 2pause and for this we’d like to thank all directors, labels and artists who have collaborated with us, together with all viewers and users who supported us and enjoyed our collection.

Bye bye.