Shynola vs Gallagher

Production company Shynola is a group of visual artists based in London, there were original three but Gideon Baws died in 2008 and they carried on as a two piece. They worked on Coldplay's 'Strawberry Swing' which was released in September 2009. There were some problems after it was released as Own Trevor who directed Andy Gallagher's 'Something Else.' They were caught up in disputes over the similarities of the two productions, although Shynola had actually never seen Trevor's work.

Shynola worked on Coldplay's 'Strawberry 

All of the input for the music video was done by Shynola, during something like this musicians have no input in what is happening. The ideas behind it were Shynola's little ideas "It was our little story: superhero saves damsel in distress.'' This idea came about through characters such as Sleeping Beauty, Flash Gordon and Orpheus. The original ideas came from one particular artist it was a section of Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer video. Shynola also noted that vertical pixilation and chalk animation has been made hundreds of times in the past. 

The ideas came about from seeing inspiring photographs from Jan Von Holleben and one image in particular from Abelardo Morell. The ideas which were taken from the photographs were of a person flying with animated chalk background, Shynola wanted them to move so they could create a video. 

 Jan Von Holleben and Abelardo Morell images had inspired them. 

Shynola posted a link onto her website stating that they hadn't caused any plagiarism and that the ideas they had adapted were universal ideas such as Superman ''Flying through the air. We believe Siegel and Shuster, creators of Superman, has probably the best stake in the claim for copyright on this one.'' One of the references for this video was Windsor McCay. Both in terms of design, and in terms of the dreamlike weirdness. With the influence featuring heavy and very noticeable  For the Dustbin Lid and Umbrella prop Shynola liked Jan Von Holleben use of regular household items for surreal uses, which I stated before that Shynola liked him before with his 'Dreams Of Flying' giving them inspirations. 

As Shynola states it is easy to find similarities in pieces of creative work as everybody isn't going to be able to come up with completely different ideas every time. This shows how easy it is to suggest plagiarism and convince artists that they are doing something wrong. Plagiarism is a very common thing to occur in music videos with even recently, Katy Perry got accused of it with her single 'Roar' which has is similar to works by Sara Bareilles and Dillon Francis. 

I don't think that Owen Trevor is right, I think what Shynola is doing is correct, I agree that creative visuals will have similarities and that ideas will be close to those who have done it before. I don't think that Trevor is right in the way he criticises Shynola and definitely not the way he does it so publicly. Shynola is right by stating their opinion and telling Owen Trevor that they did nothing wrong. I think that by making it public and stating how ideas can be crossed even though they aren't actually linked, this is because ideas can be adapted.

http://www.promonews.tv/news/2009/09/23/breaking-news-shynola-respond-strawberry-swing-%E2%80%9Csimilarities%E2%80%9D-claims - 30th September 2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shynola - 30th September 2013