Director Case Study - Jamie Thraves

Jamie Thraves is a british film director and writer. He went to Hull university and studied illustration and started making short films when he graduated. He made two films after graduated, Scratch (1991) and The Take Out (1993). He made these films using a low budget of around £5000 on each of them.

Jamie's had many successful music videos throughout his career, however he has had one music video that he is most famous for and that is the music video for 'Just' by Radiohead. (1995) This is one of Jamie's most successful videos, as well as Radiohead's most successful song. The video became more popluar than the song due to the video being very unique. It is rare that a music video features a almost cliffhanger ending, where the audience does not find out the cause of the end of the video. The video has no diegetic sound but does include subtitles to allow the audience to know what is happening.

Jamie also made another very memorable music video which is one of the best music videos of all time. The music video for 'The Scientist' by Coldplay (2003) has a very different structure, as it has a reverse narrative. In the video Coldplay's lead singer Chris Martin appears to be singing the song in normal speed walking backwards in slow motion. This means he had to learn the song backwards to be able to put this off, which took him a month. The video is also Chris Martin's girlfriend who dies towards the end of the video in a car crash. However because the story is shown in reverse this means that the car crash is the start of the story and the opening shot of the music video is the end of the story. The music video won many awards including MTV Music Video Award for Best Group Video and was nominated for Best Short Form Music Video.

Jamie Thrave's most recent music video is by a less know group called The Japanese Popstars. The song is called 'Song For Lisa', and the video is about a relatively young woman who is looking back at a day she had as a kid when she was a little girl. This revisits the places that she when that day and looks at how she has changed from past to present. At the end of the video it reveals that the woman becomes a prostitute, which is also a shook because throughout the whole video the director has tried to portray the woman as very reserved and shy, however in the final shot the girls attitude has changed and now she is almost a different person than she was throughout the rest of the video. All the video is in slow motion which I think adds to the effect of the video and makes it seem more dramatic, which is done intentionally. Jamie Thrave's focuses of the sound of the music very careful and represents a video that matches the song. I believe he does this very effectively throughout his catalogue of music videos ranging through many different genres.


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Don't Go Breaking My Heart Evaluation

For further practice for our music video we had a preliminary task of creating a short music video for the song by Elton John 'Don't Go Breaking Heart'. We did this song because it is relatively easy to lip sync to. For this song one person in our group would be Kiki Dee and one would be Elton John. They would have to sing to each other in a way that it is sung in the video.

The make sure the lip syncing is as accurate as possible Tom and Terry sung the song out loud so that their mouth would move in the correct way to make it look they are actually singing the song. The two singers work together to portray a sense of emotional chemistry. The editing was relatively simple as when all the song and all three angles were synced together that all that we needed to do was cut the three clips between all the different angles.

Don't Go Breaking My Heart Lip Syncing Exercise

Breaking My Heart David Tom Terry from Robert Clack Media and Film on Vimeo.

Vox Pop Evaluation

For our music video we had to make a vox pop where we would ask people different questions about music videos. We did this to gather information so that when we begin to create our music video was can take different opinions into consideration to form ideas that can appeal to the widest possible audience. A vox pop is a good way to gather information because by using a variety of people in our vox pop we can receive un-biased views on music videos.

To begin our vox pop we made a introduction to show what we would be interviewing in the video. We then recorded myself asking all the questions. The we followed by recorded one at a time the responses from the people we interviewed. In the editing stage we would cut them so the presenter asks the question and then all the responds would follow. For the interviews we used to boom mic for the first time. For this the person using it has to make sure that the mic is close enough to the person talking to get good sound but also make sure that mic is out of the camera shot. The person controlling the boom mic has a set of headphones connected to the camera so that they can hear the sound from the boom mic. The sound from the mic is recorded by the camera is auto syncs itself up with the footage.

In the editing stage we started of as always capturing all the footage from the cameras into Final Cut Express, once the capturing is finished then we could start editing all the clips together to put the in order. In vox pops the presenter asks the question one and then all of the responses follow. So in final cut we had to cut each individual answer from each person interviewed and then place all of the answers to a question with the presenter answering the question. Once we had finished this we then render the video into QuickTime then upload onto Youtube.

There are some minor things that we could have done better with our vox pop, a couple of times in the vox pop the boom mic would become visible in the shot. This is a minor fault but can definitely be corrected when it comes to using the boom mic again. Also, we should allow five seconds after pressing record before asking or answering questions, this way the beginning of a question or answer will not be cut off.