Earth Brother

In the midnight hour

The Chemical Brothers are embarking on a project to bring together both filmmakers and artists in a massive online geographic collaboration. The ‘Midnight Madness’ global video project, in its simplest form, is a celebration of the odd things that people get up to at the midnight hour. Fans are being asked to create short film clips (from two to 20 seconds), take a photograph, or simply celebrate “the insanity that goes on at the stroke of midnight”. The resulting footage then gets uploaded to Google Earth (via the Chemical Brothers’ website) and is tagged to its exact global location

Selected videos will then be edited by producers Nexus to form the new music video for ‘Midnight Madness’ which will debut on the website and YouTube in the same week the band’s Best Of album is released.

Deadline for submissions for the film project is Monday 25th August.

So what?: The first decade of the 21st Century has seen a notable move from privacy and CCTV concerns to an open sharing; not only private information on social networks, but also for pinpointing your exact geographical location. However, this campaign is a far cry from being a 1984-style Chemical Big Brother. Mapping consumers is key to understanding your demographic, and this achieves that in a literal sense as well as being a fun way of developing creative interaction. A good addition would have been the ability for fans en masse to request gigs in their location.

“A-ha, a user-generated music video from The Chems. The canvas (Google Earth) gives this an interesting twist. Will it broaden their market? Probably not, but it’s an engaging and fun campaign for their more tech-savvy fans.”
Alex Macnaghten, Account Manager, Margaret

www.thechemicalbrothers.com