Submarine Channel

Personalizing Your Music Video Experience

Re-using and re-mixing people’s personal Facebook photos seems to be quite the trend. We’ve found no less than 3 music videos using this type of interactivity. So today, 2Pause takes a closer look at Interactive Music Videos That Steal Your Facebook Photos.

Our favorite by far, “White Doves” for Young Empires, emerged from the hands of the young and talented director Miles Jay (recently awarded with a Cannes Lion for his interactive short Carly’s Café). The simplicity of the story about two friends reuniting is skillfully countered by atmospheric slow-mo images of rain falling and photos burning. Ok, not so nice to see YOUR pictures being set on fire, but trust us, by the time you get to the end of the video it will all have been worth it!

The application scans your Facebook photo albums for pictures in which both you and your best friend are tagged. What works best (we think) is when the selected pictures feature two people of the opposite sex. Makes it easier to identify with the boy and the girl characters in the story.

Tip: Pick your ”best friend” wisely. It helps if you share lots of pictures together. One minus of “White Doves” is that you can’t share the personalized experience with your best friend. Yes, you can share a link, but that simply re-launches the application, which will then create a new video using photos from the FB page of the person who clicked the link. Probably something to do with Facebook’s privacy policies. Nevertheless, we do highly recommend trying out “White Doves” for yourself, if only to satisfy your curiosity. And who knows, you might even shed a tear.

If you like the concept of personalized music videos, then have a look at Linking Park’s “Lost in the Echo” video (btw do we smell a rip-off here?). The story is though not as strong, and the pictures are not as spectacularly integrated… A more honest attempt perhaps, but technically more “primitive”, is Campo Grande’s “Letra da musica” – a music video that places your photos inside pictures of Brazilian landscapes… Totally out of context, but hey, at least the connections might bring a smile on your face!!