The new trend: music videos being shot on film
Recently it seems that most music videos (at least from the artists I listen to) are being shot on film, using the 4:3 aspect ratio, or both.
After watching Olivia Rodrigo’s new music video for drop dead, I decided I should write about this trend and why I think it is happening. In the age of AI slop all over the place online, shooting on film (or just putting a film grain filter on videos) is a subtle way to communicate to the audience that a music video was made by humans and recorded things that happened in the real world.
Additionally, this trend is a rebellion against the traditional video production attitude of the last few decades; film and render everything at the highest quality you can afford to, shoot in 4K or 8K or 16K, add as much CGI as you can and make sure you're mastering in HDR too!! While this attitude was mostly a vibe for the movie industry, the want to signal high production value was carried over to the music videos of some artists: think Bad Blood by Taylor Swift, for example. Also, the visual effects in Toxic by Britney Spears may have been impressive at the time (idk I wasn't alive back then), but nowadays they're distracting.
These modern music videos are actually looking more like each other, despite my prediction that the people behind the decision to shoot on film probably think that it will differentiate them from the rest. Especially when the film look isn't attached to any other aesthetic choices, it feels like a cheap (not literally if actually shooting on film) way to evoke emotion through nostalgia... which ultimately fails because nothing else about the video is nostalgic.
Is this trend probably just another symptom of the recent surge of nostalgia bait? Probably. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't shoot on film just because you want to, but I am saying that if you do, your music video won't be all that unique in that regard. And if I were you, I'd choose to shoot on digital or film based on something deeper.