music video director

MUSIC VIDEO DIRECTOR

How to be a good music video director?

Writing

it’s important to learn to write. Having a good sense of story is invaluable.

Crew Selection

A small crew travels fast, so use as few crew members as possible. Hire those that are diverse in their talents and can work several jobs simultaneously.

Shooting

instruct the singer to sing properly – no half-hearted singing or, worse, miming. If they mumble or mime, it will not look right when you lay the shots against the song, because the tension and movements of the face and body will not be consistent with the sound of the song. They must sing as if you were making a real recording of the song.

Organize

On the day of the shoot be prepared and organized. Keep a record of shots you’ve made; it’ll make editing much easier. Always allow plenty of time for shooting – the finished shot may only last 10 seconds, but could easily take several hours to set up and shoot. When you’re happy with a shot, if you have time, shoot it again. You can never have too much footage, and the retake may capture something that you hadn’t noticed first time round. You’ll have your plan and storyboard to follow, but remember that some of the best moments in a video can be unplanned.

B-Roll

You really have two choices when it comes to B-roll for musical performances. You can mix multiple camera angles and show various shots of the performer performing, or you can cut away to show shots of images related to the theme of the song. These related images can be full-motion video, but they don’t necessarily have to be. Still photos often work well in music videos. Search old photo albums to see if the images you want are already there. You can use still photos to create a video montage, with the music in the background.

Stock Footage

Short-ends or buy-back (leftover film stock from other shoots) are good ways to purchase film stock cheap. You can purchase such stock directly from shoots that are nearing completion or from film, Sometimes Kodak and Fuji will donate film or give discounts to students and young film-makers.

Editing

A nice trick I have used to edit a music video efficiently is to place all the clips on the timeline, one above the other on stacked video tracks. They must all be in their correct positions relative to the song, i.e. they must all be synchronized – except for the cutaways, which can be placed wherever you like.

Have Fun

When thinking about making videos, we ask ourselves, what would be fun to do for a few weeks? That’s where our ideas stem from.

A music video director is a film director who directs the film making of a music video.

Some music video directors are:

• Jonas Åkerlund
• George Ant
• Chris Applebaum
• Tim Armstrong
• Michael Bay
• Samuel Bayer
• Benny Boom
• Alan Calzatti
• Roman Coppola
• Chris Cunningham
• Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
• Gregory Dark
• Director X
• Shane Drake
• David Fincher
• Bill Fishman
  
  

A music video director Julien Christian  

Julien Christian Lutz was born in 1975, better known as Little X, X or Director X, is a canadien music video director  He also has his own clothing line X Fit.

Director X has been noted for his high-budget, visually distinctive music videos for popular music singles, ncluding videos for R. Kelly, Usher, kayne west, Jay-Z, Korn, David Guetta, Sean Paul, Justin Bieber, Drake, Nicki Minajand the Wanted.