page_title: The Boxer (The Chemical Brothers song)
section_title: Music video
hierarchical_section_title: The Boxer (The Chemical Brothers song) / Music video
caption_attribution_description: English: Budapest street in 2008.
context_page_description: "The Boxer" is a song recorded by English electronic music duo The Chemical Brothers for their fifth studio album Push the Button. It served as the album's third single in the United Kingdom and Europe, released by Virgin Records and Freestyle Dust, and as the second single in the United States via Astralwerks. The song is a psychedelic pop track which features The Charlatans' lead singer Tim Burgess on vocals and as a co-writer. This is the second collaboration between Burgess and the duo, following "Life is Sweet", which was released 10 years earlier.
  However, it received mixed reviews from music critics who, while praising its production, criticised Burgess' vocals. "The Boxer" was the first single by The Chemical Brothers not to reach the top 40 on the UK Singles Chart, reaching only number 41. Elsewhere, it charted in Spain, Ireland and on the US Dance Singles Sales chart. Burgess and the duo later performed the track at the BBC Radio 2 Electric Proms in 2007.
  The song's music video was directed by director duo Ne-o and shot in Budapest, Hungary.
context_section_description: London-based director duo Ne-o, Jake Knight and Ryoko Tanaka, directed the music video for "The Boxer". They were on holiday in Hong Kong and were sent a track with DRM which Knight said made it frustrating to play through dial-up connection. Tanaka eventually came up with the idea of a ball that "connected through things". Knight did not quite understand the idea at first, but through a process of miscommunication, they wrote the video's treatment about "a crazy basketball" which was the quickest treatment they had ever written at the time.
  The video was then filmed in Budapest, Hungary, over several days. Knight said: "The reason for the location stems from the music in the actual video. The ball needs to bounce synchronized with the 16th or 8th beat in the track. To do that, we needed a space with equidistant or closed surfaces to bounce around. A roof low to the floor but with uprights. Obviously parking lots are ideal. But it was a technical reason that made us go with it." Ne-o used an Arri Super 16mm film camera to shoot the film, then edited it in Adobe Premiere Pro, with 3D animation using Autodesk Softimage.
  Writing in his book Reinventing Music Video: Next-generation Directors, Their Inspiration, and Work, British author-director Matt Hanson claimed some might call the video the duo's first action sequence and stated it could be considered "a high-octane version" of Albert Lamorisse's short film The Red Balloon. He wrote: "While [the short] was a poetic 1956 study of a boy befriended by a balloon, here the action is reversed and revved up, with the basketball defiantly trying to bounce away from the city street kid."
  The video opens with a boy with a basketball in his bag walking out of a car park. The basketball then begins to bounce out of the bag, jumps out of the city streets and gets into a Lada taxi. After that, it continues to bounce and causes troubles in an office. Its owner struggles to chase the ball but then manages to catch it for a second. Unfortunately, the ball escapes and is run over by a truck driven by The Chemical Brothers. The basketball re-inflates after the accident, jumps into and eventually gets trapped inside an old phone booth near Baross Street, swells to an enormous size, and explodes.
  Later in 2011, The Chemical Brothers and director Adam Smith (credited as Flat Nose George) donated the visual of an alternate version of the song entitled "50/50 Mix", in support of the 50/50 Make or Break campaign. 50/50 Make or Break was a fundraising project aimed at raising money for East Africa, created by UK-based charity group Good for Nothing.
caption: The video was filmed in Budapest, Hungary over several days
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