In today's class, we had a talk about the industry from Phil Tidy, who has produced undirected hundreds of music videos and commercials as well as owning his own production company named 'Squire' and co-curated 'BUG' at the BFI.
He began by talking to us about how the music industry is worth about £4 billion to the UK every year with around 150K people working in some way. He elaborated on how he feels that through the proliferation of hardware and content, video and film were becoming easier and cheaper to make nowadays with something as simple as an iPhone and iMovie. The progression of technology as laid the foundations for a huge group of people who are making very low budget but high quality material and have a growing audience supporting them. Although for our music video, we are fortunate enough to have a vast amount of impressive equipment, in the industry, certainly when you first start creating music videos, commercials or films, you are often given an incredibly small budget but it's how you stretch that money and use what you have around you, that really matters. He said, 'it's far more interesting to see people finding creative ways to conquer or flip a problem on it's back and use it to their advantage than to simply avoid it and find some other way around the issue that usually involves spending a lot more money'.
He then went on to talk about music videos specifically and how he sees them more as commercials for music. When he first started creating music videos, the process would happen almost entirely without the contribution of the artists until the filming whereas nowadays, the artist/band have huge contribution over certain decisions, especially as consumers will build a star image based on what they see in the video. From his experience, he said that the artists/bands that he’s worked with either has loads of productive ideas and views on the outcome of the video whilst others have been very stubborn and hard to negotiate with. The artist/band are the product so they have to be presented in a way that their target audience will want to consume.
Phil described music videos as being a portal to other creativity and unique experiences. Music videos allow 'so much freedom of creativity’, they are demanding and require you to be ‘multidisciplinary’, or certainly learn how to be and how these two things are why creating music videos are such a good way of getting into the industry. They allow you to show off your unique creativity in a ‘suitably ridiculous’ way and teaches you so much about the industry which will later make you more appealing to production companies as you can show they a developed show real and hopefully gain you access to bigger projects.
He then went on to talk about the basic structure of the production process of a music video i.e. getting a brief (a description of what the record label and artist want from the video), developing your own treatment based on the budget, then writing up the contract and also seemingly obvious yet neglected steps such as planning out expenses for travel and other catered needs.
His process when developing an idea for a video is to come up with the performance element which is largely influenced by the artist and record label, then a narrative that will allow you to cut all your elements together and create a basic structure for the edit. Finally, he introduces a concept or some animation that will add some quirkiness to the video that would help create the star image and yet again tie all the elements together.
He concluded with a quote by Michael Anderson who said that ‘music videos came along in the early 80s and unblocked a constipated film industry and were a creative playground of experimentation and fun making ground for talent.’
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