The Cars: Sad Song Video
The Cars and thelab collaborate on the "Sad Song" video
When veteran New Wave music band, The Cars, decided to tease their first album in 20 years entitled Move Like This by releasing several music videos online, thelab had the opportunity to pitch some creative ideas to the band.
We approached the project with several treatments and story boards for the band’s catchy track entitled, “Sad Song,” featuring long time singer Ric Ocasek, Elliot Easton on guitar, drummer David Robinson, and keyboardist Greg Hawkes on bass, filling in for original member Benjamin Orr who passed away in 2000.
The creative team at thelab first discussed their interpretations of the song which lead to a brainstorm about visuals for the video. We created several treatments and storyboards which were presented directly to lead singer Ric Ocasek. After reviewing all of the work, Ocasek chose the treatment that spoke about the relationship between technology, media and the human experience. He was initially impressed by the visuals and then by how the imagery was unveiled as a narrative.
Ric Ocasek came to our offices to review the revised boards with our creative team. His direction to thelab was to be completely free with our use of storytelling and imagery and to have no restraints in our exploration of the video. Because budgets were tight, we had to put the shoot together quickly with a two day production.
The finished result is a video that symbolically visualizes the experience of technology’s command over our everyday attention spans, changing the way people communicate. The video uses imagery like balloons to represent human thoughts and TV static as a symbol of technology and the mental noise of the mind to tell that story.