Juno Awards Video of the Year Nominees: Behind the Music Video

When a band puts their latest music video online, fans eagerly favourite it, comment on it, embed, tweet and link to it. But how much do they think about all the hard work involved in creating these clips?

For the upcoming Juno Awards this Sunday in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada's Grammy doppelganger nominated five unique music videos to compete for Video of the Year. Each required a Herculean effort, taking anywhere from a few weeks to several months in post-production alone.

Spinner reached the nominated directors to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on how these acclaimed music videos came together.

Beast - 'Mr. Hurricane' (Directed by Ben Steiger-Levine)

Montreal-based director Ben Steiger-Levine was inspired by Beast's bee-themed album artwork. "I started seeing Mr. Hurricane being formed out of these bees... something about the movement of these bees evokes the idea of a hurricane forming, so then I thought, 'why not have a bee character?'" he tells Spinner. He imagined Mr. Hurricane as a ghost of a man who can only inhabit lost souls. "This idea that this person whose life is very much in turmoil but who also kind of lives very isolated or is very alone."

The Junos weren't the first to recognize the video's brilliance -- it also earned a surprise Grammy nomination for Best Music Video, alongside clips from international superstars like Coldplay and eventual-winners Black Eyed Peas.



The Most Serene Republic - 'Heavens to Purgatory' (Directed by Ben Steiger-Levine)

For this video, Steiger-Levine began with a colour wheel theme -- the band, and several props, were dressed in different colours while the camera circled the room. From there it grew from having the band play throughout a mansion to having individual body parts perform. Most of the video ended up getting worked out in post-production, piecing together static camera shots and painting out the green-screened musicians.

Steiger-Levine, his team and the band spent two days in the mansion and wound up in some awkward, but entertaining positions. "It was pretty funny because we actually dug through the couch and cut out the back of it and the band members are actually hiding in the couch trying to play," he said. "It was quite awkward and made for some funny physical moments with a lot of stretching and bending backwards."



Classified - 'Anybody Listening' (Directed by Harv Glazer)

Some artists have a producer they just can't work without -- it seems East Coast rapper Classified has a similar relationship with video director Harv Glazer. They've been collaborating for the past four years and have a pair of MuchMusic Video Awards to show for it, including one for 'Anybody Listening.'

The video was shot in downtown Toronto on a weekend where Glazer was able to step away from filming 'Van Wilder: Freshman Year' and the rapper flew in from Nova Scotia. Glazer, a fan of street artists like Banksy, had been hoping to work a graffiti theme into a music video for a while because, that's "who the new social commentators are... They're not on the internet and they're not in the news and they're not on TV -- they're more out in the public and out in the open."

In the video, Glazer pays homage to Banksy with a Canadian twist by replicating the artist's trademark rats, only replacing them with squirrels -- a common sight in Canada.



Serena Ryder - Little Bit of Red' (Directed by Mark Ricciardelli)

Ricciardelli, a Toronto-based director, had an idea brewing about paint suspended in air. He didn't think it was possible to do, especially on a budget, but he pushed hard for it and wound up with a visually arresting video.

The clip is a single shot following Ryder around as she spreads red and blue paint with her fingers. Ricciardelli set up shop in a film studio in Toronto's east end -- coincidentally in the same location where Feist's ubiquitous video for '1 2 3 4' was shot -- with a huge camera on a track and a green screen that had to be held by two men so it could follow Ryder around. "It gets to a point where everyone on the crew is just thinking, 'is this going to work?'" said Ricciardelli. But after about ten takes, they got everything just right.



Land of Talk - 'It's Okay' by (Directed by WeWereMonkeys)

Montreal-based producer Marcella Moser and directors Mihai Wilson and Davide Disaro were inspired by the story of Antiope, one of the last Amazon queens, who rode into battle to defend her people against the Athenians. "The lyrics are about [an] attachment from affection and relationships and affectionate situations towards an unknown destiny," Disaro tells Spinner. "So the idea of the Amazon worked really well because a figure of a woman is the last survivor of our delicate situation like a war, an unknown destiny."

After filming for three days in Okanagan, B.C., the directors took the footage to Vancouver, where they laboured over the complex animation, illustrations and 3D effects. Rather than breaking up the action with quick cuts, the clip stands out by using about ten long shots for a slow-motion affect. "We ended up creating something very counter to what a lot of music videos are like today," Wilson says.