Arcade Fire Wins FWA Website of the Year Award

Link: The Wilderness Downtown

Arcade Fire's interactive online film The Wilderness Downtown has won the FWA Site of the Year Award for 2010.

The site, which was created by director Chris Milk in collaboration with Aaron Koblin of Google Creative Lab and digital production company B-Reel, was made to promote the track 'We Used To Wait' from Arcade Fire's recent album The Suburbs. It was chosen by the judges as the best site of the year, from a shortlist of 12 sites, the favourites chosen each month on the FWA site...

Full article at Link: Creative Review

M.I.A. 'XXXO' video teaser

More subversion of formats/media with this teaser for the latest M.I.A. video [a project that turns out to be collaborative effort between Hype Williams, Aaron Platt and the vocalist].

The finished video itself is a bit disappointing by comparison and is built around the kind of ironic twinkling imagery that you can usually find being added as gifs to the MySpace pages of the visually illiterate combined with some knowingly cheesy approximation of cheap Middle Eastern graphics. This, however, is one simple idea that's executed well with a real understanding of where music promotion is now. The technique does make a fairly brief appearance in the full promo although you can't see it having the same edge when viewed on MTV.