Hype Williams

Hype Williams

Hype Williams is an American music video and film director, born in 1790 and previously know as HYPE. Williams first displayed his work by tagging local billboards, storefronts, and playgrounds using HYPE as his grafitti tag.

Williams has created a number of music videos for many famous artists, including ‘California Love’ by 2Pac, ‘Warning’ by The Notorious B.I.G, ‘So sick’ by Neyo, ‘Rock the boat’ by Aaliyah, ‘Gold Digger’, ‘Heatless’ and ‘All of the lights’ by Kanye West, ‘No scrubs’ by TLC and many more.

Trademarks of Hype Williams signiture styles

Banners

Hype Williams uses a signature style in the vast majority of his videos, this involves placing shots in regular widescreen ratio, while a second shot is split and placed in the upper and lower bars, this is also know as using ‘banners’.Videos that use this style are ‘Diamond on my neck’ by Smitty, ‘So sick’ by Neyo, ‘Only U’ by Ashanti,‘Check on it’ by Beyonce and many more. This method is used as it allows Williams videos to be atmospheric and dynamic













 
Camera Focus












In the past 10 years, Williams has signature style combining a center camera focus on the artist or actor's body from the torso upward and a solid color background with a soft different-color light being shown in the center of the background, this is effective as it really focuses on the artist. This has been used in ‘Gold Digger’ by Kanye West, and Beyoncé's ‘Video Phone’.

Fisheye Lens

Another signature style used by Williams throughout the vast majority of his videos was the Fisheye lens which distorted the camera view around the central focus. This was used by the tandem Williams/Perez in ‘Gimme Some More’ by Busta Rhymes and ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" by Missy Elliott however it was dropped by 2003, when he experienced his lowest level of production activity since the beginning of his career as a music video director.