Industry news & advice blog

Justin is a young Australian creative filmmaker. Now based in London,
he is concentrating on directing music videos.

We met up when I heard about Justin’s project to film 5 unsigned bands music videos in one day (Leisurama, E Man, Ludwig Amadeus, MK The Don, Darius Cartier).  I had never participated in the shooting of a music video so everything was quite new to me. At first I couldn’t see how so many music videos could be shot in one day so to make this possible, he shot one band after the other in front of a green screen in a Hackney studio. The green screen allows him to create the background and special effects after the shooting.

To get this project to run smoothly on the day, a lot of preparation had to be done: “I had to meet up with everyone, share ideas. I was constantly sending emails around, I had to book the studio, make-up artists and other people involved. We received a revolving stage for one of the videos, had dancers and an actor as well, which then means you have to think about costumes for them too! It can be easy to get a bit overwhelmed by the scale of production, so it's important to keep focused!”

I was particularly interested in understanding more about the interaction between the video director and the music. Justin focuses on the energy of the music, “It's got to be interesting and it has to make people want to move. If it's lifeless then the shoot will be boring and it will be hard to get the team motivated - this will show up in the finished product too.”

He mentioned how sometimes he comes up with a concept after the first listen. “It's exciting because you just let your imagination run with the flow of the song. If I can have a storyboard sketched out after a couple of plays, then I'm onto a good thing.”Describing the music director’s job he explained that the director had the vision, and it was his job to get that vision onto the screen. “This can be tricky, especially when you are working in a studio with just a green screen as a background. It's about bringing out the best performance in people.” For some of the bands this was their first video shoot, so a good tip to make first-timers comfortable in front of the camera is to simply tell them to pretend they are performing on stage.
 
On a smaller budget, the director frequently takes on different roles; he can often be the camera operator and producer so a lot of planning and coordinating will be necessary weeks before the actual studio day. On the day, the crew consisted of 2 make-up artists, a photographer, a production assistant and Justin as director/producer. But on big budget productions you can have anything from caterers, gaffers, clappers, dolly operators, as Justin put it: the Hollywood kind of stuff!

The green screen helps Justin be even more creative during his favourite part, the editing. “It can be a nightmare if you don't prepare the shots, so although it is the last thing you do, it's important to be thinking about it at the start of the project when you are drawing up storyboards. I prepare the video in ‘Final Cut Pro’, basically put all the shots together in the right order. It doesn't look like much at this stage because they all have green backgrounds. From there I put the rough cut into ‘After Effects’, the program that I create all my special effects and backgrounds in.”

The main aspect of the green screen that appealed to Justin was that it enables him to be completely creative with the shooting as there is no need to constantly be changing the lights or camera angles, it renders the whole process faster than a traditional shooting. I was quite amazed by the simplicity of the green screen, as I naively thought it was a “specific hi-tech” screen when actually you can just use a piece of green cotton or cloth…

The average music video can be broken up in the following way: it's about 40% pre-production (planning, organising and coordinating everything for the shoot), 10% filming in the studio and the remaining 50% in post-production. “Sometimes the most difficult part is knowing when to stop. If you have a good project that you are getting really involved in, it can be easy to spend too much time getting it 'just right'. It takes about a month to complete a video from start to finish.”

Taking a look at the broader music video industry, Justin felt that what MTV plays is less and less relevant: “Michael Jackson’s 'Thriller' video was huge - it's the first video I think of when someone talks about music on MTV and it was released 27 years ago. When you think about it, just 5 years ago there wasn't the same huge presence of video on the internet like there is today. Budding filmmakers were still quite limited in terms of equipment, whereas today, with the right networks you can upload a video, share it on different social networks and blogs, and in a matter of hours you may have thousands of views. It's been proven countless times that you don't need any budget to create an internet hit - just a great idea. I don't know if huge budgets are still necessary but I think artists and directors will always be pushing the limits. As we are moving out of recession and there are increases in online music sales, the next stage in the cycle could be a resurgence in big budget videos - that's if people get tired of watching 4 men dancing on treadmills!”

Justin recommended a couple of new directors to watch out for: “Marco Brambilla, a film maker who did an incredible installation called 'Civilization'. It's featured in the elevators of the Standard Hotel in NYC. It takes people on a trip from hell to heaven as they go up, or from heaven to hell as they go down. He was recently commissioned to do the music videofor 'Power' by Kanye West. It is only short, but it's such an epic piece. The video for Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' is great too: she wrote the treatment and it was directed by Francis Lawrence, director of 'I Am Legend'. It's very conceptual, but it has a plot, avant-garde fashion, and some seriously cool shots. It's just what the boring, generic pop world needs!”

You can already see the result of the day’s shooting as Justin has uploaded two of the five videos on his website. Enjoy!

Links:
To Justin Hazelton’s Website click here

Click for bands links:
Leisurama
E Man
Ludwig Amadeus
Darius Cartier