It’s been a little rough for Coldplay lately. As we mentioned last week, just days after settling with Joe Satriani over plagiarism allegations, the band is now being accused of copyright violations by UK musician Andy J. Gallagher for borrowing from Gallagher’s “Something Else” video with their video for “Strawberry Swing”. Despite the epic foursome keeping mum, the video’s creative team is now shouting their story from the rooftop.
Via TwentyFourBit, the London-based Shynola posted on Coldplay’s official site a PDF file explaining the creation of the video. While Gallagher didn’t outright say Shynola stole, he did say it was less than fair that the video will win numerous awards and receive industry praise when director Owen Trevor had the idea the year before.
As for the Shynola, the six page PDF’s main talking points include taking further heat off Coldplay by separating them from the video creation process and, more importantly, claiming in both text and picture-by-picture comparisons, the lack of innovation in both concept and technical achievements. When asked by Motionographer about how they’ve taken similar concepts in videos like Adele’s “Chasing Pavements” and make them their own, Chris Harding from Shynola claimed they’re nothing but hard workers.
“We’re aware of those videos, and I don’t wish to denigrate them, but we thought there was more mileage in the technique than they had explored,” Harding said. “We never claim to be original, just rigorous. So we wrote a story we thought would be entertaining and went about making it. It was a lot of hard work.”
As always, we’ll leave it up to you to make any distinctions.
