With A9’s latest album IDEAL being out in stores since April 12, the band continues to promote the album with a music video of its title track, ADAM, through YouTube. ADAM follows a similar musical direction of recent releases such as the single MEMENTO—which we’ve come to love—and in its music video it is presented in a digital-like world. The best part about this music video is however without a doubt its super, ultra and astonishing visual effects (we’re being sarcastic here).
We thought the days of cheap green screening was over, we were wrong.
It’s no doubt A9 is back in the game and hitting it hard! The proof of this is, naturally, the new album, IDEAL, an album full of rock and roll with various of interesting elements never seen before from this band, until recently. That’s all good, and we love it, but what didn’t sit well with us was the unrefined music video, ADAM. Rather than “unrefined”, it was just a huge clusterjam, simply put. You can thank the person who was in charge of the sloppy work taken place during the post-production. The performance by the members was, however, as elegant as always. The music video features some cheesy visual effects representing a skill level of a typical novice. Mainly, it’s the chroma keying work which is upsetting, aka the effort put into “green screen replacement”. The cutouts are either really blurry—to forcefully blend in the subject with the background—or noticeable sharp with a cutout precision of a child with scissors. We thought the days of cheap green screen music videos for visual kei band’s were over, but we were wrong. Let us explain what we mean with some examples.
Who needs fingers to play the guitar? At least Hiroto doesn’t. Part of his face has also been chopped of in the picture to the right.
“Hey boss, can I let my son finish the rest of the video?”
“I don’t see why not?”
Special effects of insanity, it’s just too cool to be true.
It’s just too bad that A9’s elegant and artistic photoshoot standards don’t reflect the standards of their latest music video. Judging from the fact that the music video wasn’t made available along with the album release—not even the limited edition, we suspect this could have been the result of a miscalculation in the post production department. Perhaps they had to rush it? For a recent music video where green screening is done right, check out D=OUT’s upcoming Bakuchi music video.
IDEAL
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Regular edition CD
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Limited edition CD
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