The Story Behind the Best Music Video of 2010

sour

Zen, acoustic guitars and OAuth: Those are the key ingredients of Mirror, a music video for the most recent single of the Japanese indie band Sour. Mirror isn’t like any music video you’ve ever seen before: It asks viewers to authorize access to their Twitter and Facebook profiles as well as their web page, then mashes all this personal information to an amazing clip that pushes the boundaries of web programming and online video. (Check it out yourself if you haven’t seen it yet, and make sure you authorize both access to your webcam and at least one of the two social networks. You’ll enjoy it, I promise.)

However, Mirror isn’t just about doing crazy stuff that no one else has done before; it’s also a very intimate interpretation of the Sour song, the video’s creative director Masashi Kawamura told me today during a phone conversation. “The general theme of the track is that you can find yourself in the reflections of other people,” he said. He ran with this idea and applied it to Facebook and Twitter: “What if you could see who you are through the connections you have on social networks?”

Kawamura has been producing artwork and music videos for Sour ever since the band came together in 2002, and he’s gotten some attention for the video to the band’s previous single Hibi no neiro, which has received some 3.3 million views on YouTube to date. That video featured a patchwork of webcam recordings from fans and curious online users alike, but Kawamura wanted to take interactivity one step further for Mirror.

He joined with two coders in Japan and coordinated the production with them via Skype video chats. Kawamura himself lives in New York, where his day job has him working for Wieden & Kennedy. His productions for Sour are a labor-of-love side project, done both out of fandom and friendship, which also means that the production costs are incredibly low. Mirror was entirely financed through a $5,000 Kickstarter fund, which mostly paid for servers and other resources.

Kawamura told me the next step for Sour will be to make Mirror work on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — a problem that’s also not something music video producers usually have to wrangle with. He doesn’t have any immediate plans for the band beyond that, but he’s definitely caught the fever to explore further use of social graph data for music videos. “This is the closest you can get to feeling like you are the hero in a music video,” he said.

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