Alex Southam as well as Emil Nava also freelances for OB Management. He originally trained to become a lawyer but decided to turn into a new direction and work in filming. His reason for deciding to make music videos was that he wanted to 'learn the trade'.
One
of Alex Southam’s previous employers Agile Films described him as: An exciting
new talent who works in a dizzying variety of styles in both live and
animation. For a person who is entirely self-taught his creativity has caught
the eye of a series of independent promos for the likes of Walkmen, Alt+J and
Lianne la Havas. Alex joined Agile in August 2012.
When
Southam began his career, he undertook all of the tasks in his video such as
Filming, Lighting and Editing. But now he uses a Director of Photography, which
helps him to create his videos. In Southam’s videos, he likes to use the format
where ‘you can try new techniques and can have real artistic freedom’. I
believe that he means that you can also try new techniques when you are filming and that you should be able to have as much creative freedom as you have the imagination for. This means that he is a lot less keen on commercials because they all for a lot less creative freedom. He uses a online showcase called 'Vimeo' to show his videos. This website/application is becoming a lot more popular platform as it is considered to be a 'higher status' than Youtube.
His big breakthrough started with a video Tesselate by Alt J. He was provided with a budget of £10,000 and all of the shooting was completed in 1 day. The casting for the video was quite large and he also used aftereffect in the video. The other video that he directed was for Chase & Status - Lost and Not Found. For this video he was given a budget of £50,000 which is seen as a medium amount size of money when you compare is works to the likes of Emil Navas (who i have explained in the previous post) He decided to film the video in Los Angeles and used Steadicam. Steadicam is a stabilising camera which is used for smooth filming and ignores the camera mans movement. I believe that it is mainly used when the user of the camera is trying to move and keeo the camera steady at the same time. He filmed the video at 36 FPS (frames per second) which is rather high quality but then decided to slow the footage down. He fwas influenced by Massive Attacks - Unfinished Sympathy. He thought that the best way to make the video was to aim to make the video look like it was from the early 1990's with a VHS look. The unique thing about the video is that there are only three edits throughout the entire clips. Can you spot them?
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