Music Video Director - Hype Williams

Music video director

The music video director I am analysing is Hype Williams born in 1970 Queens, New York. Hype Williams is an American music video, screen writer and film director of African-American descent. He earned the nickname of ‘Hype’ as a child who was hyperactive and first displayed his work of graffiti which showed off his interests in colour even then.

Hype Williams is an extremely successful music video director who has made a large amount of videos that people listen to and watch even today. He has worked with some big names in the music industry such as R-Kelly, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Will Smith and Beyonce.

Hype Williams first recorded music video was in 1991 by BWP (Bytches With Problems) “We Want Money”. This video consisted of simple shots and not many quick edits or cuts which may seem far too simple nowadays was very complex and amazing in the 90’s. They used a lot of low angle shots and two shots and the affect of the camera spinning really quickly.

Hype Williams has a very long list of music videos he has directed. He has worked with a number of artists and these videos are extremely well known and remembered. Some examples of these are, R-Kelly “I Believe I Can Fly” (1996), TLC “No Scrubs” (1999), Kanye West “Gold Digger” (2005), Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys “New York” (2009) and these are only a selected few. Hype Williams has been an extremely successful director since the 90’s and is still directing music videos as his list goes up to the year 2011. He is also a film director and has a film called ‘Lust’ coming out in 2012 which will be his most previous work yet.

All the videos I have seen by Hype Williams are all performance based videos. He always shows the main performer/singer as they are. Mainly dancing or just singing. They are not usually telling stories or show wacky visuals. 

Hype Williams has some signature styles which are used a majority of his videos. An example of this is called the ‘Fisheye lens’. This was an effect on the camera that distorted the camera view around the central focus. This style was used in videos such as Busta Rhymes’ “Gimme some more” and Will Smiths “Getting’ Jiggy Wit It”.

However this was dropped by 2003 when Hype experienced his lowest ever viewing levels since the beginning of his music video director career.

 Another signature style of Hype Williams is one of his better known.

This Signature style involves putting shots in regular widescreen ratio while a second shot is split in half horizontally and then placed in the upper and lower bars of the video. This was used in videos such as Ne-yo’s “So Sick” (2005), LL Cool J ft J.Lo “Control Myself” (2006) and Beyonce’s “Check On It” (2005).

Hype Williams received MTV’s Video Vanguard Award for his achievement as a filmmaker in 2006 and is being nominated for Video Director of the Year at the BET Awards of 2011.

Since 2003, Hype has adapted a new style which is a style combining a centre camera focus on the artist or artists body and a solid background colour with a soft different coloured light in the background to give a sense of illumination of the background by the foreground subject. This style is shown in Beyonce’s “Video Phone” (2009) and Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” (2005)