As you slowly emerge from the hibernation mode of deepest, darkest winter, Gap's new branded content project is guaranteed to inject a little colour into your life and get you in the mood for spring.

Sound of Color sees Gap team up with San Francisco creative agency Rehab on a rainbow-themed branded content project. Having recruited a spectrum of five music acts, from post-punk duo the Raveonettes to hip-hop artist Swizz Beatz, they gave each band a colour and asked them to write a song. They then brought five directors from different production companies on board to create a video for each song. As far as Rehab were concerned, music and video were an effective way of reaching the target audience - and they'll be creating a Sound of Color experience in Gap Annex, New York, for the duration of the project.

Ryan Ebner's film for Paint Me In Your Sunshine

Instead of the usual music video process of in-depth consultation with the bands, the directors were simply given the song and a colour and left to create. The resulting promos are pretty diverse as each filmmaker took the idea of colour in a totally different direction.

Chris Do of Blind, LA/New York, used the Raveonettes' song Black/White for an exploration of contrasts. "Black and white, unlike other colours, could be interpreted as light and shadow as opposed to its pure chromatic representation," he explains. "That thinking led us down this path towards shadow puppetry, an ancient form of storytelling."

Meanwhile for Russ Lamoureux of Biscuit, who created a video for the song Magic by indie band The Blakes, blue was used to define the protagonist's fantasy land. "He spends most of his time in a daydream, so that's where the colour really works. When we see him in the real world blue recedes into the background."

Clowning around in Gatsoulis' film for Swizz Beatz

Tom Gatsoulis from Boxer Films decided to use his colour, green, sparingly in his clown car chase desert nightmare for Swizz Beatz. "On an emotional level to me green represented hope and the song was so evocative and into car culture so I knew I wanted to include that. The more I listened to the track I saw a car chase happening. I thought I would emphasise the green by using it the least," he explains.

Throughout the project, client and agency were unusually hands-off. All the directors were free to come up with their own concepts and could largely do what they wanted. James Frost, who made the Turning Red video for electro artist Dntel with his creative partner Mary Fagot, says that both Rehab and Gap were positive about all their idea - the only concern was that the idea was too ambitious given the time and budget constraints.

One of the few ground rules was that there was to be no mention of Gap - which begs the question: are the films branded content or just subsidised music videos? Certainly most branded content refers in some subtle way to the product behind it.

The directors all have very different opinions on the matter. Ryan Ebner of HSI, who created the upbeat video for Marié Digby's Paint Me In Your Sunshine, enjoyed dabbling in the world of promos. "For me personally, it was like shooting a music video, my first one, actually. Yes, it is branded content as well, but for me everything was driven by Marie's song, to the point that we even wanted to feature her in the video," he explains.

Meanwhile Frost feels that the online realm means that the films are much more than traditional music videos. "We find that unlike contemporary music video which tends to have an extremely narrow definition of what is possible, that digital content has become an extremely open creative space where the possibilities are endless."

The videos can be seen at www.soundofcolour.com and all the original tracks are available for free download until March 15.