Michael Jackson's brain is on a shelf.
Paul Simon's elephant and Tears for Fears' sun are tucked away elsewhere at music video director Jim Blashfield's studio.The brain is clay, and appears in the video for Jackson's song, "Leave Me Alone." The elephant, which stars in the "Boy in the Bubble" video, is a photograph acquired from a 1950s movie. And the sun is really a 3-inch paper cutout, stuck to a wall since its appearance in the "Sowing the Seeds of Love" video.
In the four years since Jim Blashfield & Associates began making music videos, the director has raked in awards, as well as business from such musicians as Joni Mitchell and Peter Gabriel, and Memorex, the Public Broadcasting Service and even "Sesame Street."
"He's one of the top five video makers," said Jeff Ayeroff, president of Virgin Records' U.S. division. "I deal with this stuff every day, so I know how good this guy is. So much of what we see in videos is stupidly exploitative, but his work is sort of a psychedelic celebration. It makes you walk away and say, `Geez, that was interesting.' "
The Jackson piece took a Golden Lion award - the highest honor - in the category of commercials, short films and videos at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It also won the 1989 MTV award for special effects.
MTV nominated that reel in five other categories, and has nominated other Blashfield videos. "Sowing the Seeds of Love" was No. 1 on MTV's Top 20 Video Countdown in October.
Blashfield's style features colors from some otherworldly Crayola box, coins and globes spinning through space, and flying people.
"Essentially, you're making up reality," Blashfield said.
In the Jackson video, the star moves through a surreal world of floating chairs, huge chomping teeth and amusement park rides.
It took 25 people six months to make the video, which clocks in at 4 minutes, 45 seconds. It features photo collage animation, using 24 photographs per second and a total of 6,840 photographs.
Blashfield's videos aren't just giant grab bags of weird objects on film. The Jackson video tells a story: Jackson has become an amusement park and has been tied down like Gulliver by the nuisances that come with megadoses of fame.
Blashfield got started in the music video business in 1985, with the hit video for Talking Heads' "And She Was."
On a whim, his former producer, Melissa Marsland, sent a copy of their 12-minute "Suspicious Circumstances" film to Talking Heads' management company. Blashfield got a call a few days later asking if he would like to make the video for "And She Was." He and his staff - mostly part-time temporary employees and some free lancers - had just 28 days to make it.
"It looked like it might be impossible," Blashfield said. He got so nervous about the production that he once woke up in the middle of the night thinking, "What have I gotten myself into? Did I actually say I knew how to do this?"
Blashfield described work on the videos as collaborative, with producers handling finances and client relations, supervising production and helping with creative work. Also involved are animators, photographers, artists and production assistants.
"My job is to come up with ideas and kind of guide people," he said.
Until the Talking Heads video, Blashfield had been barely supporting himself with local commercials and documentaries, animation and experimental films.
He is 45 now, but his fling with film began at 19. Blashfield had acted in high school and college productions, and met a Portland filmmaker, John Rausch, through a play. "I thought, `I could actually make those things that go up on the screen,' " he recalled.
He often looks at photos or objects to develop ideas. "Sometimes I can see things in my head, but very often my head is not loaded with images. Once you get a seed of something, it reminds you of things."
Ideas also come from Blashfield's musician clients, with whom he confers by telephone and in person. Later, his staff spends two or three days getting the musicians on film.
Blashfield and company went to Los Angeles to film Michael Jackson "flying" in a toy rocket at a soundstage, but Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell traveled to Portland for shooting.
There's no need to move to Los Angeles or New York to be at the top of his profession, Blashfield said.
"I'm in a really fortunate position. What you'll find in L.A. now is a lot of people trying to figure out how they could live in a place like Portland and still do national-based work."
Blashfield's clients must meet his personal standards.
Tears for Fears qualified. "Sowing the Seeds of Love" is a humanitarian song with spiritual overtones. The video includes a striking, seemingly three-dimensional scene of a multifaceted mandala - a circular form symbolizing the universe in Eastern religions.