Chris Milk

He’s the cinematic poet of HTML5, whose groundbreaking interactive videos for Johnny Cash and Arcade Fire are redefining the music video experience for the Google Chrome generation. David Knight finds out the shape of things to come from the meticulous maverick of @radical.media.

Chris Milk has a problem with music videos. And not for the usual reasons directors complain about, like budgets, scheduling or creative control. It is more fundamental than that. “I have a problem with music videos as an art form,” he declares. “I feel that, compared to straight music, they pale into comparison in the emotional connection they have with people.” This may seem surprising coming from one of the most accomplished directors working in the medium, the creator of award-winning videos for Kanye West, Gnarls Barkley, U2 and others. But Milk is unequivocal.

“Music is interactive by its nature – it scores your life,” he continues. “You can sing along with it in the car, you can do the dishes to it, it becomes the soundtrack to that summer with that girl. And when you hear it, you’re instantly transported back to that time.” Only the sense of smell, he says, has the same ability to deliver what he calls ‘emotional memory’. “It’s a powerful thing and I don’t believe that music videos can do that.”

Having reached this damning verdict, other directors might decide to focus on other things, like making more commercials – which Milk does, too, with great panache. But not Chris Milk. Instead, he has progressed from mere video director to orchestrator of fully immersive, interactive audio-visual events.

Together with digital artist Aaron Koblin, Milk has devised and directed two major internet-based projects, and achieved alchemy by creating unique emotional experiences involving music, through technology. Firstly, for the title track from Johnny Cash’s final, posthumously-released album Ain’t No Grave, Milk and Koblin created The Johnny Cash Project, a crowdsourcing experience where visitors to the website were invited to draw over individual frames of archive footage of the great man, with Photoshoplike tools available on the site.

Once approved, the single-frame artworks were added to the timeline of the video, joining the artworks of other Cash fans to be rated in various ways, and effectively becoming part of an collectively-created animated promo for the song. That was followed by The Wilderness Downtown, an innovative web experience, created in association with Google, with a spectacular pay-off. The visitor is invited to enter the address of their childhood home.

Then, to Arcade Fire’s We Used To Wait, new windows burst open on the browser: a boy runs down a suburban street, tiny 3D birds fl y overhead – and a window opens on an aerial shot of your childhood home, courtesy of Google Maps and Street View. The video takes you into your street (as it is now), another window asks you to write a postcard to your childhood self, the message extending like branches on a tree. Finally, the boy becomes computerised, and the street becomes a forest, as 3D trees explode out of the ground.

Both the Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown are remarkable, groundbreaking works. Experience them, and you can understand what Milk is saying about the shortcomings of the traditional music video. “I’m trying to address this concrete thing dictated by the single vision of the director – the official four minutes of visuals for this song,” he says. “Music doesn’t lend itself to having an official visual, it’s this soup of emotional memory and nostalgia that connects to you. I want to try to present that in a visual way.”

The Los Angeles-based director is in London for a conference, and badly jet-lagged. But while discussing these two seminal projects, he radiates the qualities that have defined his career thus far: passion, single-mindedness, self-belief and rigourously thought-through ideas. He is something of a mild-mannered maverick, having graduated from commercial directing to music videos, rather than the other way round. His first video, for The Chemical Brothers’ The Golden Path in 2003, was followed by a burst of activity, including videos for Modest Mouse, Courtney Love and Kanye West.

He has become less prolific since then, while his work has become increasingly compelling – particularly when turning Kanye West into Evel Knievel for Touch The Sky, and Gnarls Barkley’s Cee-Lo Green into a singing, bleeding heart in Who’s Gonna Save My Soul? Milk enjoys his independence. “I like doing projects that take a long time and that don’t have a huge amount of money attached to them, so I get creative freedom.” He refuses to take on more than one job at a time, so the creative process is not compromised.

“You have to immerse yourself in the project because that’s when the real answers start to come out – you stop thinking about it logically, and start thinking about it on a visceral, emotional level.“ But he is now demonstrating the implications of the internet succeeding television as the main distribution network for music video. “On the internet you can communicate with the viewer and the viewer can communicate back to you. You don’t have to make a video to just play on YouTube, you can make it live in a browser and do all these things.”

He started to make this happen after meeting Koblin last year at the OFFF tech conference in Lisbon. “Aaron was showing his crowdsourcing projects, and we started talking about how that could translate into the music video space,” Milk explains. “We pretty much figured out what it was going to be right there – where people draw individual frames of the video, with built-in drawing tools on the site and different versions aggregated on the server side.”

Then Milk bumped into Rick Rubin, producer of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings albums, with whom Milk had worked on his U2 and Green Day projects in 2006. “I mentioned that I had this idea, and that if he had a Johnny Cash single left over, this was a project that it could work for. He said, ‘It’s fate, because I’m currently finishing the mix of the final Johnny Cash studio album, and I have no idea what to do for a visual.’” It took eight months until the Johnny Cash Project website came to fruition, and Milk estimates that 50,000 contributions have been submitted. He has moderated it mostly himself and created a broadcast version using his favourite frames, plus a ‘making of’ documentary.

As Milk points out, the project requires a commitment from contributors. “There’s a lot of work up front for one eighth of a second of the actual piece, but for people with the emotional connection [to Johnny Cash] that can mean a lot. With the Arcade Fire piece I wanted to try to flip that math – a very small time investment up front, but the maximum amount of you in the piece.” In fact, the Wilderness Downtown initiative began with Google, keen to promote the next generation of web development, particularly cutting-edge code HTML5. “They realised that doing something like a music video utilising this technology would bring it to a much wider audience.”

Milk almost worked with Arcade Fire on their Neon Bible album, and contacted frontman Win Butler as the band were finishing their next release, The Suburbs. Butler sent Milk some tracks, which included We Used To Wait. The song contrasts the old and the new – the simple pleasure of waiting for a letter from someone, compared to the immediacy and instant gratification available now. With unprecedented access to Google Maps and Street View, Milk realised that he held the potential to explore this theme. A simple test confirmed the idea’s potential.

“I’ve been on Google Maps before and looked at the trails I used to ride my bike on. I knew that this dataset had that incredible emotional context. So I asked my girlfriend to tell me her old house address, and we found it on Google Earth. I’d figured out how to make it do a 360 by hitting buttons on the keyboard. I did that, while the crescendo in We Used To Wait was playing, with a zoom out in the end, and she started welling up. I knew I was on to something.”

What Milk and Koblin were able to do with HTML5 was turn the Street View information into a music video-like experience, along with 3D elements. The final, real-world element is The Wilderness Machine, a mechanical device-cum-exhibit, that can write out the postcards submitted by viewers on the website. “I wanted to bring it back to the analogue and have a machine physically write out those messages onto real postcards. And I wanted to introduce the idea of ‘waiting’ back into the project.” Milk describes Google’s involvement as “non-obtrusive brand content, essentially – but it makes sense because we’re utilising the technology. It’s become the platform in which to make the art.”

And the thought occurs: presumably this could be applied to advertising. Would he consider a similar project for, say, Coca-Cola? “It’s possible. I still love doing commercials. But it’s a really long process compared to the usual production schedule.” There is another obstacle: Milk’s long-held ambition to make features. He has two projects in development, one music-related and potentially multi-layered, for Brian Burton’s (aka Danger Mouse) new venture, Rome. Milk is creative director for the project, mainly a soundtrack score, but also with vocals by Jack White and Norah Jones, which he hopes will culminate in a movie.

Before that, the plan is to introduce characters and storyline through various channels, including a music video, a tour and online, in tune with the way we now consume media. “The gold standard for me is still the communal cinema experience – that’s what I’m really interested in creating,” explains Milk. “But the internet is just getting out of its first stage, to be able to tell stories on a much larger scale.”