Pharrell Williams became known for his ''catchy'' song ''Happy'' in 2014. Not only did Pharrell rule the charts, he also created one of the biggest creations of cross media convergence of its time.
Alongside the release of his single, Pharrell Williams also released a 24 hour version of his music video, which showed different clips depending on the time zone/location in which you clicked the link. This 24 hour music video aired at the Buenos Aires Film Festival, showing how a mass market product can appeal to a niche audience. To date, the video has 668million views on YouTube. The exchange of the 24 hour music video was widely encouraged by Pharrell and his team, along with the encouragement of fans recreating their own version of the ''Happy'' music video, with the original text symbols and ideas from the original music video.
This promotion allowed ''Happy'' to become much more known, with fans from around the globe creating their own ''Happy'' music videos with the tagline, ''We Are Happy From...''. Many examples of exchange have come from places such as Japan, America, Mongolia, Australia, Unibas and many other locations.
Many of the videos were very professional and received many views themselves.
Continuing it's promotion and viral spread, the audio became the soundtrack to the children's film, ''Despicable Me'', creating another link between the single and other media texts. An example of this is the featuring of the films ''Minion'' characters in the music video to the single.
The popularity of the music video comes down to it's simplicity. The video was directed by a French production team, known as ''We Are From LA''. The simplicity of the video was also translated into the hardware used to create it as all the shots were merely filmed with a steady cam. Both the team and Pharrell Williams can be responsible for the changing nature of copyright infringements due to their encouragement for others to use the track to express themselves.
The success of the music video led to it winning many awards at the Grammy's.
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