Telephone Frame by Frame

MTV Shows

In our continuing efforts to take you, the loyal music lover, deeper into the minds of today’s artists, MTV News presents “Frame by Frame.” Each week, we’ll get a musician to give you the inside scoop on their latest music video. The 2010 MTV Video Music Awards are still six months away, but you can certainly pencil in one early contender for a slew of Moonman trophies when the show rolls around. Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” has taken the music world by storm with its killer dancing, epic length, melodramatic story, envelope-pushing fashion and wanton violence. The tag-team with Beyoncé was directed by Jonas Akerlund, who sat down with MTV News for a guided tour through one of the most impressive clips in recent memory. Akerlund was complimentary of Gaga (who he said was “full of ideas”) but had just as many lovely things to say about Ms. Knowles. “We only had one day with Beyoncé, but she’s such a professional,” he explained. “In the big dance scene with her, she rehearsed it on her own the day before. Lady Gaga and her dancers had rehearsed a lot together, but Beyoncé stepped into it and pretty much nailed it.” The director also took a lot of pride in the run-up to the first appearance of Beyoncé in the video. “The idea was always to not really know who she was until we see here, but we did add her name on the speaker at the beginning,” he said. “But the reveal of Beyoncé with the hat is pretty cool.” In fact, the whole thing is pretty cool, and it’s slowly morphing into something more. “It’s actually supposed to be attached to the other video we did last year for ‘Paparazzi,’ which was six minutes long and this is almost 10 minutes,” Akerlund explained. “So it’s already become something of a short film.” Though he claimed the “To Be Continued” note at the end of the video is meaningless, here’s hoping Akerlund’s Gaga-based saga continues. Source: MTV