UK boy-band colossus One Direction recently unveiled their latest music video, for the single You & I, which features the 1D members strolling wistfully through the third act of Brighton Rock, and while it means glee for tweens worldwide, Aussie production firm Oh Yeah Wow aren’t quite as overjoyed.
As far as they’re concerned, the You & I clip, directed by Ben Winston with alleged input from the band itself, is a hijacking of their J Award-winning video for Clubfeet‘s Everything You Wanted, a similarly desaturated clip that features hallucinatory freeze-frame effects like those in You & I.
“It seems that the chaps of One Direction have taken it upon themselves to regurgitate our original concept, as seen in our award-winning clip for Clubfeet’s Everything You Wanted,” write Oh Yeah Wow in No Direction, an official statement released on their website addressing the “hijack.”
While the firm concedes that the Clubfeet vid did not feature 1D’s facial morphing effects — they refer specifically to the third act, which features noticeably similar freeze-frame effects and member Niall Horan performing the shittest cartwheel ever — and that “creative evolution” and reinterpretation are natural and she should be encouraged, in this case, they’re calling shenanigans.
“We have experienced plagiarism from all over the globe, including bands from Japan, Turkey, Thailand and Poland, some of which have been taken down due to so much public backlash,” write OYW, in a manner consistent with the manifesto of a displaced or downtrodden ethnic group.
According to the statement and OYW office manager Seamus Spilsbury, who recently spoke to Triple J on the matter, the firm’s problem is that while Everything You Wanted was done on a shoestring budget, 1D “[threw] hundreds of thousands of dollars at it as their promotional tool.”
But it’s also that “in our clip, there’s an image of a guy jumping off a box, and then there’s the One Direction guys jumping off a box in their clip. They’re not creating a new way to use it – they’re just using our concept and [mirroring our] execution.” Ah. Readers can view OYW’s full statement below.
Was Pharrell Williams’ “groundbreaking” ‘Happy’ video also a “hijack”? Full details here.
Watch: Clubfeet – Everything You Wanted
Watch: One Direction – You & I
Oh Yeah Wow’s ‘No Direction’ Statement
Late Friday night whilst we were busy observing the good traditions of the public holiday, something very suspicious was brought to our attention. It seems that the chaps of One Direction have taken it upon themselves to regurgitate our original concept, as seen in our award-winning clip for Clubfeet’s Everything You Wanted. Don’t get us wrong, we here at Oh Yeah Wow are big One Direction fans and are envious of their ability to maintain flawless hairdos.
(yes 1d fans, we are aware ours doesn’t have the creepy facial morph stuff, we’re specifically talking about the 3rd act)
Sadly, we’re actually kind of used to it now. This isn’t the first time that the concept for this video has been hijacked; we have experienced plagiarism from all over the globe, including bands from Japan, Turkey, Thailand and Poland, some of which have been taken down due to so much public backlash.
To be crystal clear, OYW has nothing against creative evolution. Artists constantly reinterpret other works that have inspired them and we’re fine with people taking a technique and using it to create something new- our clip for Gotye was loosely based on the genius short film Tango by Zbigniew Rybczynski, for example.
The wider problem is, that plagiarism and copycatting is becoming increasingly common and acceptable. When did we, society, become so complacent as to allow this kind of behaviour to become normal practice in the media industry? It is for this very reason we have decided (this time) to rally some support- for the last thing we want is a generation of kids labelling our Clubfeet video a One Direction rip off in years to come.
Considering the sleep deprivation one must endure to create an original piece with practically no budget, you can start to understand the annoyance we might feel when some affluent young bucks and a director devoid of creativity, decide to effectively steal (and subsequently dilute) our idea.
Any sharing and posting you can do for us would be much appreciated. Below are the twitter ID’s of band members and the Director/production Company. Be sure to use the hashtag #nodirection and link to this article.
