Skate videos popularized the use of the fish eye lens. Music videos had people waving their hands around in the face of the camera because it looks cool through that lens. The idea was applied to still images, and this is the result.
Everybody is just trying to look cool. Everybody probably looks like a “poser” to someone else. And in a cruel twist of irony, the inventors and early adopters of some “cool” new thing, look derivative and boring years AFTER everyone else has done it. Kids don’t have a long memory for these kinds of things; they grew up in a world where it was already old news and boring, never having experienced a world without it. This shift in perception can happen sometimes even among people old enough to have been there at the beginning. So yeah, they are just a bunch of posers trying to look cool, but aren’t we all?
Skate videos popularized the use of the fish eye lens. Music videos had people waving their hands around in the face of the camera because it looks cool through that lens. The idea was applied to still images, and this is the result.
Hype Williams directed the music videos in the 90s-2000s with lots of contrast, bright colors, bright lights, and the fisheye lens.
If you look up some Busta Rhymes music videos you will see plenty of examples.
It’s weird but, without the sound track these gifs just look like a bunch of posers trying to look cool.
Everybody is just trying to look cool. Everybody probably looks like a “poser” to someone else. And in a cruel twist of irony, the inventors and early adopters of some “cool” new thing, look derivative and boring years AFTER everyone else has done it. Kids don’t have a long memory for these kinds of things; they grew up in a world where it was already old news and boring, never having experienced a world without it. This shift in perception can happen sometimes even among people old enough to have been there at the beginning. So yeah, they are just a bunch of posers trying to look cool, but aren’t we all?
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but with the music it also looks that way to someone over twenty years old or so.
It was a remarkably stupid time, however even back then there were better music videos. E.g. stuff by Michel Gondry, Run Wrake, or Spike Jonze.
I jumped in slow motion / off the curb.
Without a skateboard / that should look absurd!
But with my fisheye lens / hey, haven’t ya heard?
I got the moves so smooth / to make ya mom say:
…those are some exceptionally smooth moves!