Video Genius: Lance Bangs

Lance Bangs with Fred Armisen

Lance Bangs is a music video director, not much older than you or I, who got his start in music video by doing a lot of live footage. A lot of it's still around and it's mostly very good from what I hear. Although he still does dabble in live footage (much of it is actually really good, check out these videos of Arcade Fire and Yeah Yeah Yeahs) his real butter and bread is in music video.

His style seems early 90's at times, but he mostly comes off as just a garage-editing geek. I love it! You can tell he's got a small budget, but he tries his best to stretch it out as far as he can, like in this video by The Thermals:



In that video, he makes fun of what a music video "is supposed to be." His budget, obviously tiny, is exemplified with plastic helicopters and hand drawn bomb shells.

He's a very talented and humorous dude, much like myself I should say. He uses similar styles in his videos as well, it's pretty easy to watch a video and say "Hey, I bet Lance Bangs made that" and only be wrong 10-20% of the time. If you watched that Yeah Yeah Yeah's live footage above, you'll notice that this Black Keys video shares a similar aesthetic:

The Black Keys - New Music - More Music Videos

And finally, my favorite Lance Bangs video, Wet and Rusting by Menomena:



For high quality downloads of any of these videos, check out Lance Bangs . Com. You'll need Quicktime to watch them and they are rather large files.