Directors Study - Michel Gondry

Born in 1963 he grew up in Versailles with a family who was very influenced by pop music. When he was young, Gondry wanted to be a painter or an inventor. In the 80s he entered in an art school in Paris where he could develop his graphic skills and where he also met friends with whom he created a pop-rock band called Oui-Oui. The band released 2 albums ('Chacun tout le monde' and 'Formidable') and several singles until their separation in 1992. Gondry was the drummer of the band and also directed their video clips in which it was possible to see his strange world, influenced by the 60s and by his childhood. One of his videos was shown on MTV and when Björk saw it, she asked him to make her first solo video for 'Human Behaviour'. The partnership is famous: Gondry directed five other Björk's videos, benefiting by the huge budgets. This led to commissions for other artists around the world, including Massive Attack. He also made a lot of commercials for Gap, Smirnoff, Air France, Nike, Coca Cola, Adidas, Polaroid and Levi - the latter making him the most highly-awarded director for a one-off commercial.

Gondry’s style
Gondry has a very unique style, he loves the idea of surreal settings and visual effects. His music videos have been portrayed as very smart, as he likes to perfect the music with visuals. He is known to make good use of space with the rhythm of music, to make the video itself appealing to the audience. A great example of Gondry’s work where he has cleverely done this, is Daft Punk “around the world” he uses all the dancers in the video individually to represent a beat, he also uses his space well by making the space appear “round” to connote the title of the song.

Facts

In his video clips and commercials, he was a pioneer for a lot of things. For example the video clip he made for IAM (Je danse le Mia) was the first video clip using the morphing technics. And above all he invented the technique of several cameras taking pictures in the same time around somebody. This technique was used for the first time in a commercial for insurance, then in Björk's "Army of Me" video clip and in The Matrix (1999).
Gondry is a musician which may of helped inspire his passion for music. He has shown his talent by appearing in Kanye West’s video "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (2005) playing the drums. "Before he lost the shop my father gave me a drum kit and my brother a bass guitar. We formed a couple of bands together, that played punk rock...or maybe it was more like New Wave...and that's how I got into music. Then when I left Versailles to go to art college in Paris I formed the band Oui Oui with some friends from college."

His 1994 "Drugstore" spot for Levi's 501 Jeans holds the record for most awards won by a TV commercial.

Personal Quotes

“Sometimes it's better to have less money and more freedom.”
“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”


Music Videos

Daft Punk “Around the world”
White Stripes “Fell in love with a girl”
“Dance Tonight" Paul McCartney (2007)
Kanye West “Heard em say”
Kylie Minogue “come into my world”
Radio Head “knives Out”
The chemical Brothers “Star Guitar”
The Rolling Stones “Like a Rolling Stone”

Target Audience (Research)

Within brainstorming ideas about our music video, we knew that we would have to choose a specific audience that our text would be appealing towards. All media texts are aimed at specific audiences, so it is important that we get a clear and precise target audience for our music video.

Bearing in mind that Vampire Weekend are a indie/rock band, narrows down the possibilities for our choice. The song we have chosen, A-Punk is a fast, upbeat song with strange and bizarre lyrics, this also contributes to our choice of target viewers. Vampire Weekend aimed their first album, self titled 'Vampire Weekend' at a young audience, ages 15 - 25 this includes both males and females. Similarly to the band themselves, we have come to the decision that we will be aiming our video at a young audience.

Our video will be designed with the target audience in mind, predominantly between the ages of 16 and 25. This is the age of students. The reason why we have chosen this age gap is because, bands such as Vampire Weekend are mostly advertised and spoke of between younger generations. We would expect our audience to have an in depth knowledge about music and the 'indie' genre pre-exisiting and perhaps playing music in a band of their own. We have a select target audience as we believe anyone older than this age will struggle to understand the music and lyrics of the song and as the 'indie' genre has only come along recently, we can expect most older listeners not to know of the genre.

Vampire Weekend began in New York City, America. Soon after releasing their first album in 2008, which shocked audiences by peaking in the top 20 albums in both England and America. They began touring England and Europe in the summer of 2008 where they played at multiple venues including a number of university campuses, in relation to this knowledge, another feature of our target audience is that they will mostly be pre/post or present university graduates this is because bands such as Vampire Weekend are already popular within the intellectual age groups that attend university.

Knowing our target audience will help us design our video, we can include intertextual references that our desired audience will understand along with a lot of other under wrapped messages and links.

Ian

Directors Study - Tim Pope

Tim Pope was born in London in 1956. Despite having directed feature films and even having a brief pop career, he is most famous for directing music videos, most notably for The Cure.
The thing that strikes me as most impressive, and most inspiring, about Pope is his ability to be consistently innovative. The way in which he was able to come up with so many unique ideas on a regular basis, and then project these ideas onto our screens has left a long lasting effect on his audiences.
Another challenge was to strike a relationship with The Cure's music, which was innovative in its own right, and create a music video that represented the song both visually and musically.

The main feature throughout this video is self-reflexivity. The video oozes it from start to finish, starting with the director shouting 'Cut!' (a strange opening typical of both Pope and The Cure) to the physical changing of the background and the setting up of the different sets by on screen workers. The video has the mentality of 'You know it's a music video, we know it's a music video, so why try and pretend it isn't a music video?', which in my opinion is a very refreshing idea, and one that we could use in the production of our video to give it the same wacky, unconventional style that worked so well for Tim Pope and the Cure.

Costume Ideas

After deliberating and brainstorming ideas around a concept for our music videos, we realised that one particular theme was preferable from all of the group. This theme consisted of dressing up in costumes. We then had to decide what kind of costume to use in our production.

The costume had to work in the concept and also entertain the target audience. An idea for a costume that kept cropping up was fruit costumes. With fruit costumes we thought we could make interesting links between visuals and music as well as links between visuals and lyrics.

From these videos you can see the sort of costumes we are interested in using. By using these costumes I think we can create a really interesting visual style when mixed with some guerrilla filming techniques. We could also use the costumes to produce a great concept based video when used with post production techniques and clever camera work.

Please leave us some comments to let use know what you think of the costumes.

Many thanks

Oli

Inspiration - Remi Gaillard - Guerrilla Filming

Remi Gaillard is not a well known film maker in higher and more sophisticated media circles; neither is he renowned for making any official media productions. However, those who browse for media online will know that he has become an internet celebrity. His work consists mainly of jokes and pranks and doesn't relate directly to the music video genre, but his visual style really appeals to me and I can see this style working well with our group's initial ideas and concepts (which were put forward during brainstorming).

I first became aware of Gaillard's work during the Channel 4 programme 'Rude Tube' where one of his videos was shown to be in the top 50 most viewed videos on the world wide web. After viewing some of his videos online, I immediately became a fan of his guerrilla style of filming. His work reminds me of some of Spike Jonzes' videos, consisting of guerilla style filming and a low production value feel. I think these characteristics could easily be incorporated into our initial production concepts to create a unique style and very original idea.

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As you may have gathered from this video, Gaillard is a bit of a prankster and joker. Nevertheless, his post production techniques and visual style have created an entertaining video in this case. I feel that using some of Remi Gaillard's techniques and styles in our own production would benefit us in terms of creating an original and refreshing music video to the song 'A-Punk' by Vampire Weekend.


Oli

Directors Study - Spike Jonze

Over the past few weeks we have been looking for inspiration into music video directors, after coming across Spike Jonze we found an instant connection with his style, we could relate to his producing and directing of music videos and loved his work.

Spike has a background from skateboarding and BMXing, and this shows through in his work. He has been known to use what can be described as 'a guerilla style' when directing music videos, and doesn't follow in the footsteps of directors such as Michel Gondry, who aims to have everything perfectly in time and place. Spike goes against this convention by producing rough videos using unsteady camera shots with a high degree of self reflexivity.

This video (Sure Shot) performed by the Beastie Boys is one of Jonze's music videos, released in 1994. At the time of shooting, Jonze had only 2 years experience in the music video industry, but this example is key when showing Jonze's unique style of directing. The video was produced with somewhat low production values and would not have cost excessive amounts, and this is one way in which we can relate and idolise his work. We see very few steady camera shots, the actors are mainly shouting at the camera or hanging on a frame above the camera.

Throughout the video we see a shot with a crane in the background, this is clearly the same crane which the actors are swinging on in an earlier shot, but Jonze doesn't care that we know this, as he is of the belief that we already know it is a music video and that it doesn't matter that we can see its constucted nature.

Another example of Jonze's directing style, is the end scene with the three members of the Beastie Boys in the casino. It is actually illegal to film in a casino, to get around this, Jonze simply shoved a camera in the back of a bag and walked in front of the men whilst filming.

Overall we enjoy Jonze's work and can appreciate how he manages to produce such high standard work with such simple ideas, he is a director that we can definitely learn from and adapt ideas.

Ian

Les Petites Bourrettes - Pour me Rendre a mon Bureau

This is the music video for Pour me Rendre a mon Bureau by Les Petites Bourrettes.

Les Petites Bourrettes are a quirky quintet from Paris. Despite having played at some very famous venues and festivals, they spend most of their time performing in the streets for money, using makeshift instruments (such as a dustbin connected to a long piece of wood and one string instead of a bass guitar).
Although they have an extremely close, devoted fanbase, they haven't really achieved any widespread success, which is why I think this video is so successful. Despite being produced on a limited budget (like us), it is still very clever and effective.

The video provides an excellent example of the multi-boxed split-screen effect that we hope to include in our video, with people and objects interchanging between the barriers and moving into separate scenes.

Stan

Welcome to Break Out! Productions!

Welcome to Break Out! Productions!

This is the official blog for the A2 group of Stan Evans, Ian Thornton, Oli Hunt and Natalie Darnell.
Over the next few months we will be posting anything and everything regarding the production of our music video. This will include director profiles, examples of other music videos, texts and articles that have provided information and inspiration as well as all of the little details about the actual music video.
We have decided to produce a music video for the song A-Punk by Vampire Weekend, as we feel we can be extremely creative with the song. It is also a personal favourite of ours.
We hope to include everything that has influenced us and our creative decisions on this blog, so look out for posts over the next couple of months for information.

Thanks!

Stan
Break Out! Productions