(blog 12) Alex Southam

Blog 12 Case Study 3 Alex Southam

Alex Southam has worked for Agile films who have described him on their websites as:

'Alex South is 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. Southam joined Agile in August 2012'.


To begin with Southam undertook all the tasks on his videos
Camera
Lighting
Editing
and now uses a Director of Photography

Alex Southam likes the format of music videos as, 'You can try new techniques and can have real artistic freedom'.

Southam is less keen on commercials as they allow for 'much less freedom'
He uses Vimeo to showcase his videos - this is becoming an increasingly important platform as it is considered to have 'higher status' than Youtube.

His breakthrough came with the video tesselate for Alt J. The budget for the video was £10,000, it was a 1 day shoot and had a very large cast. Special effects - used After effects.

Alt-J - Tessellate




Chase & Status - Lost and Not found 

This video had a £50,000 budget and was filmed in Los Angeles. For the video they used a Steadicam and they filmed at 36 frames per second then slowed the slowed down a bit. The video was influenced by Massive Attack's Unfinished Sympathy. There were only three shots in the whole video.







Andrew Goodwin key features of music videos

Andrew Goodwin in Dancing in the Distraction Factory (Made in 1992).
Goodwin has identified the following features of music videos:



Key features of music videos

• Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics for example: stage performance in Metal videos, Dance routines for boy/girl band.
• There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals; this is either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting.
• The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close-ups of the artist and the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work (A visuable style) e.g: Katy Perry / Michael Jackson (To be analysed in separate blogs).
• There is frequently reference to the notion of looking (screens within screens, telescopes, etc) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.
• There are often intertextual reference

Illustrate, Amplify & Disjuncture

There are three ways in which music videos work to promote a song:

Illustrate:

1.  Music videos can use a set of images in order to illustrate the meaning of lyrics & genre, this is the most common type of music video. E.g:

Owl City - Fireflies

Amplify:

2.  This is where the meaning of the song is completely ignored.

one example of this would be:

Ed Sheeran - You need me, I Don't need you

Kanye West - Home coming Ft. Cold Play

Disjuncture:

3.   This is similar to repeatability. Meanings and effects are manipulated and constantly shown through the video and drummed into our vision.

Praise You - Fatboy Slim