About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Hype Williams

Encyclopedia : H : HY : HYP : Hype Williams

Hype Williams in 2002.
Enlarge
Hype Williams in 2002.

Harold "Hype" Williams (born 1970 in Queens, New York) is a music video and film director of African-American and Honduran descent.[link].

Williams is notable for creating a number of groundbreaking and successful music videos for hip hop and R&B artists such as Craig Mack ("Flava In Ya Ear"), LL Cool J ("Doin' It"), Nas ("If I Ruled The World (Imagine That)", "Street Dreams"), Missy Elliott ("The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)", "She's a Bitch"), Busta Rhymes ("Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See"), Kelis ("Caught Out There"), and Jay-Z ("Big Pimpin'")

Contents

Biography

Directorial career

Williams began his career as an art director; one of his first jobs was designing the sets and costumes for the first TLC video, "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg", in 1991. He directed his first major music video, "Can It All Be So Simple" by The Wu-Tang Clan, in 1994. After the success of these and subsequent video projects, Williams became the highest-paid and most requested urban music video director by the end of the 1990s.

In 1998, Williams directed his first theatrical feature film, Belly; the film was mildly received by both critics and audiences. Recent years have found him gravitating away from music video directing and planning to take on more feature projects, one of which is a projected remake of the 1960s anime Speed Racer. In 2003, Williams came back from his hiatus with new clips for New Edition and Ja Rule, and is looking into video game and feature-film ventures.

Style

Hype Williams' videos of the late-1990s and early 2000s were typified by a grand scale. The director often used fisheye lenses, large sets, heavily saturated (and/or neon) colors and expensive wardrobe, costumes, and special effects to give his clients a larger-than-life look. This style is particularly prominent in his work with Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott, two of his most frequent clients from 1997 to 2001. Many of Williams' videos also make extensive use of the talents of several female models, which has led to accusations of exploitation by several critics.

For most of his more recent videos, Williams creates a letterbox effect by having a main image in the middle (where a film would be in letterbox format) and having a second image behind it, split by the first image. As he had done in the past, Williams continues to front each video he directs with a title sequence, which presents his name, the name of the music artist(s), and the name of the song in a stylized format matching the video clip to follow.

Videography

Craig Mack in his video for "Flava in Your Ear [Remix&#093" (1994), directed by Hype Williams.
Enlarge
Craig Mack in his video for "Flava in Your Ear [Remix]" (1994), directed by Hype Williams.

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

Busta Rhymes in the video for his 1997 single "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See" (1997), directed by Hype Williams.
Enlarge
Busta Rhymes in the video for his 1997 single "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See" (1997), directed by Hype Williams.

1997

1998

1999

2000

Damon Dash and Jay-Z in the video for Jay-Z's 2000 single "Big Pimpin'", directed by Hype Williams.
Enlarge
Damon Dash and Jay-Z in the video for Jay-Z's 2000 single "Big Pimpin'", directed by Hype Williams.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: