Editing: The White Stripes- Hardest Button to Button

Video directed by Michel Gondry.



This music video from the middle of the White Stripes' career relies entirely on editing. There are no long shots. Each take lasts between a few frames to just less than a second. Gondry uses hundreds of very short shots to animate the band, in a sloppier, more jittery version of stop motion animation.

In the beginning of the video, the drummer Meg moves, exactly with the drumbeat, in a bizarre way. She is not walking. Instead, her entire drum set scoots through the landscape, and multiplies as she goes, leaving a trail of empty drum sets behind her. The singer, Jack, walks in what appears to be a normal fashion. In this sequence, especially when they walk down the stairs, the edits for Meg are obvious, while the edits for Jack are seamless- I am not even sure if his walking was shot in the same multiple-takes way as Meg's was.