Music Video
The song's music video, directed by Bryan Barber, is based on The Beatles' landmark appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, but sets the action in London.
The beginning and end of the video blend with those of "The Way You Move" so that the two can be watched in either order, and a "The Way You Move/Hey Ya!" video combining both clips with a bridging sequence was released on the OutKast: The Videos DVD.
In the video, André 3000 plays all eight members of The Love Below: keyboardist Benjamin Andre, bassist Possum Jenkins, vocalist Ice Cold 3000, drummer Dookie Blasingame, three backing vocalists The Love Haters, and guitarist Johnny Vulture. The video opens with the band's manager Antwan (Big Boi) talking to Ice Cold 3000 and Dookie Blasingame backstage. Meanwhile, the television presenter, portrayed by Ryan Phillippe, tries to calm a crowd of screaming girls on a show being broadcast live in black-and-white. The band performs while the girls in the audience scream loudly; one girl is carried off by security after rushing the stage, and another faints. A family is shown dancing to the broadcast at home. When André 3000 instructs to "shake it like a Polaroid picture", some of the girls begin taking pictures and shaking them. Ice Cold 3000 dances with one of the girls on stage, and the video closes with several friends of the band watching and discussing the performance.
The music video was filmed in two days in August 2003 on a sound stage at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, California. The cast consisted of over 100 girls. Each of André 3000's parts was shot several times from different angles, and he performed the song 23 times during the course of filming. Because releasing "Hey Ya!" as a single was a last minute decision, André did not have time to choreograph the parts, and all of the dancing was improvised. Ice Cold 3000's sequences were the first filmed, resulting in the character's energetic performance, and Johnny Vulture's were the last, so André, exhausted from the previous takes, sat on a stool for those sequences.
The music video proved to be a success. The video debuted on MTV's Total Request Live on September 5, 2003 at number ten. It topped the countdown for 19 days and retired at number eight on November 24, having spent 50 days on the program. At the 2004 MTV Video Music Awards, the video won four awards for Video of the Year, Best Hip-Hop Video, Best Special Effects, and Best Art Direction.
It was also nominated for Best Direction but lost to Jay-Z's "99 Problems". "Hey Ya!" was nominated for Best Short Form Music Video at the 46th Grammy Awards, but it lost to Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt". In Canada, the video topped MuchMusic's Countdown for four weeks, and it won the award for Best International Group at the 2004 MuchMusic Video Awards. In 2006, Stylus Magazine listed it at number 72 on its "Top 100 Music Videos of All Time", comparing André 3000's dancing to James Brown's performances in the early 1970s.
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