Alex Southam is a trained lawyer however once he began his job as a lawyer he found it very boring so he decided to begin his career n filming music videos, to start of he started to teach himself how to make videos, from the editing to the cinematogrophy. This means as a director Alex is able to do all of the stages of making a music video himself which is very useful if working on a tight budget. Alex freelances for OB management and has also work for Agile Films who described him on their website as 'an exciting new talent, working in a dizzying variety of styles across live action and animation. ENtirely self-taught, his inventiveness and creativity have caught the eye with a series of diverse promos for the likes of the Walkmen, Alt+J and Lianne La Havas'
Alex is very keen on music videos because of the creative freedom and it allows you to try new techniques. he uses Vimeo to showcase his videos, Vimeo is seen to have a 'higher status' than YouTube. His breakthrough was when he created the video for 'Tesselate' and Alt J song. The budget for this was £10,000 and took 1 day to film with a larger cast. This video is very good as ot had many storylines going on at once and the camera zoomed into each one of them and you was given a different story, one of which was a group of people gambiling on the floor another was two boys trying to flirt with a girl and not succeding. This is a very unique video and was very successful for Alex.
Alex then filmed a video for chase and status this time however the budget was much bigger and was around £50,000. This was filmed inn Los Angeles and was fimed in 36 frames per second then slowed down. Alex tried to create an early 1990's VHS video look. There where only three shots in the whole video however they are hard to spot as Alex wanted it to seem it was all filmed in one shot. This video was about a man who had kidnapped a girl which then is found with the girl and the girl and the man end up running away together after stealing a policewomans gun.
Emil Nava began his career in the film industry as a runner for film production companies. This allowed him to be introduced into the film industry and worked his way up into becoming an assistant director for Blink Productions. Emil started to make adverts for big companies, this was good for Emil finacially, but the creative element in adverts was minimal so Emil decieded to make music videos. His first music video was for a band called Kid British with their song 'Our House is Dadless'. This had a fairly small budget of around £20,000. With this budget he done a very good job for an up and coming young band. He used the local people of mancher=ster to help film this all in one day.
Emil mainly freelances for OB management, which aim to match the right director with the right band to help them grow. This is a good philosophy to have in place as it allows young directors to grow successfully, as if they were put with a band that they had no idea about that genre of music they would struggle.
EMil has directed many pop videos for artist ranging from Jessie J to Ed Sheeran. One of his best videos in my opionon was Ed Sheeran's 'You need me I dont need you'. This was a very good video as the idea to have a one person signing all the song lyrics in sign language is very clever and very unique. The budget for this was only around 35,000.
Emils top tip for when filming a music video are to use extreme close ups on faces whenever possible, such as videos like 'Nothing compares 2 U' and 'Cry' both very iconic videos which all use these extreme close ups often.
Jamie Thraves is a director who started off by making short films in university, once he created an award winning short film he used that to open the door into making music videos, his breakthrough music video was for Radiohead's 'Just'. This is where a man lies on the floor and gets confronted by an angry crowd where he tells them his secret making them all fall to the ground. This video was shot in 3 days and the budget given to Jamie was £100,000.
Once he created this he also directed the music video of Coldplay's 'The Scientist' where he focuses on one line of the song 'Im going back to the start' and reverses the video where it is before him and his girlfriend crashes in a car. Apart from that line the music video has no other connection to the actual music video. This video was also shot in 3 days and Jamie had a budget of £200,000 for this video. Both of these videos made it into the top 100 music videos which shows how good Jamie Thraves is at creating music videos.
Jamie used these videos to try and break into the feature film industry, so far he has shot three features:
Goodwin says pop video are often used to reinforce an artists brand image. This blog will explore how far this is true with regard to Katy Perry. It will also examine how pop videos reflect her private life and to reconnect her with her target audience.
This video shows many narratives throughout the song. All the narratives are to do with people overcoming their self confidence and doing what they want in life. One of which was a girl who was not comfortable with the way she looked and overcame this and got into a bikini and had fun with all of her friends. This video is a very inspirational video as it helps alot of 12-15 year old girls (her target audience) confidence about their current situation. This video makes Katy Perry look like an older sister which her target audience can look up to and idolise.
Katy Perry's next video further backs up her image of an older sister figure to her target audience as it shows that she is not afarid to make a fool out of her self and even after her make over is complete she doesnt want to alienate any of her fans so she mocks the way ''pretty girls'' acts by wearing odd shoes and finding it hard to walk in her high heels. This video can relate to some of her audience especially the young girls because Katy Perry is showing it doesnt matter what you look like you can still fit in and have fun. Again it can give confidence to her audience because they she Katy looking ''ugly'' and still fitting in with her friends and having one of the best nights of her life.
After this Katy Perry met her future husband Russell Brand who is
an adimted sex addicted and is a very sexually orientated person. Once Katy and Russell was in a relationship Katy brought out her video for 'California Girls' it showed Katy to be very raunchy by her having hardly any clothes on, and at one point none on whats so ever. Obviously Russells ways had rubbed off on Katy. This damaged Katy's image as the older sister idol and started to change and she started to show more of a sex appeal which is not what her target audience wanted to see.
After Katy's marraige with Russell Brand had finished she was in the press for wrong reasons. So she then had this video of 'Wide Awake'. This video starts off where 'California Girls' finished with Katy naked on the cloud, then someone hands her a towel and follows her to the dressing room for a brief moment you think that the man is going into the dressing room with her but Katy quickly dismisses him by saying 'Bye'. This shows that she has less sex appeal now. It then transistions into the actual video for 'Wide Awake' where it is all dark and black, as she travels through the maze there is one strawberry which i think symbolises the apple of eden, and also Russell Brand. She then takes a bite as it represents the apple of eden, it is obviously a bad fruit, just like Russell Brand was bad for her life. She then meets herself but in a younger form to show that Katy's innocence to the world is back. She then travels through the maze meeting journalists that are in the dark, showing that they have been evil towards her, and also a man on a horse, who again symbolises Russell Brand which Katy Perry punches in the face a creates a heart hole in the wall.
For practice for our music video had a preliminary task of making a short video for Elton John's 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart'. We did this song because it was a duet and the lyrics are fairly simple to learn therefore easy to lip sync the song and for our music task we didnt want anything incredibly hard to do.
To lip sync successfully me and Tom played the song out loud and started to sing a long with it while we was recording. We sung the whole part of the section we was doing with one camera shot then changed the camera shot and sung it all again. We did this so when it came to the editing it would be all synced up and much easier to edit. When editing we made changed the camera shot regually so that the shot we was showing did'nt get boring. We also tried to cut to a different shot every time the beat made a certain sound we done this in none section of the video and it looks very good. After we had rendered the video and put it onto Vimeo we relised that in one part of the video goes black as we did not put a clip on there. This was a mistake that occured as we did not watch the video once we had finished and it could have easily been avoided.
Overall i think we done an excellent job at our first short task of the music video, there could have been a few improvements such as a more energetic performace and the mistake while editing but as it was our first time filming a music video I feel as we did a good job and any mistake that we did made can be rectified and make our final piece of coursework much better.
