Ollie Allgrove presentation

Ollie Allgrove, who has a background in feature films, music videos and commercials, visited our school giving us advice on our music videos.

He currently works for the independent studio, Passion Pictures, which specialises in high-end animation and commercials; Passion Pictures work has been multi award winning, a key example being the animated Meerkat campaign for Comparethemarket.com. Ollie has worked on feature films, TV commercials and even Nature Documentaries; he explained that at the heart of everything in the industry is story telling.

Ollie went to explain aspects of film production, explaining that talent management represents directors, producers and even VFX artists. The directors usually communicate ideas to both the talent and crew.

He told us that people commonly misunderstand the purpose of a music video; an artists music video provides a unique visual voice and a creative point of view, moreover the number of views are a way of measuring success. Also the number of views may translate into profit if products placement has been used in the video,

Ollie also old us the roles of the people surrounding the artist being firstly the record label, who commissions the videos, the management, who protects the artist, and the artist themselves who collaborates creative ideas with the director.

The artist is ultimately seeking hits with the video, they can achieve this through noise, impacts and typically controversy.

Ollie continued to explain the timeline of a music video.

1.     The brief

2.     The treatment

The treatment very briefly documents the ideas throughout the video, this is vital as it is difficult to gauge an audiences attention for 3 minutes. It could also include storyboards. It would discuss the look and the wardrobe and the reasoning behind it. This is where the director communicates with the crew and wardrobe etc.

3.     The shoot

On the day everyone would know his or her role due to the intensive planning. He explained that shooting music videos is ideal for exploring creative idea.

4.     The edit

Ollie stated that it is important to maximise time on shoot as editing holds a specific value and ideas can considerably more expensive in post production.

He continued to tell us about two music videos he had created in the past with Goldfrapp and Joe Lean. The Goldfrapp music video was particularly unusual as his studio was approached to created a 40 minute narrative that was made up of the individual music videos of songs from the album. The result end up being very successful as it was released to 300 cinemas as a short film further promoting the music. Also, his video with Joe Lean was a one day shoot with a small budget of only £2500 hence they could only afford one special moment which was one of the members jumping off the roof of a hospital wing with an umberella. The video was made with only a small digital canon camera, edited on a laptop and used a small amount of after effects. Here is the result:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x33tzx_joe-lean-and-the-jing-jang-jong-luc_news