Passion Pictures: Q and A with Oliver Allgrove

Presentation followed by a Q and A with Oliver Allgrove of Passion Pictures

Passion Pictures was founded in 1987 by Andrew Ruhemann and has offices in London, New York, Melbourne and Paris.

This makes the company nearly 30 years old, and they are a film production company, making many commercials and music video, which makes the far more relevant to what I am currently doing. They are an independent company that have won an academy award for their work on One Day in September. They are also a multi-award winning company.

Generally they do a lot of animation work, most noteably creating the Meercats for the ComparetheMarket.com adverts.

Following Oliver's presentation and question and answer, a main theme from the discussion was that the music industry has changed dramatically over the last ten years, as the invention of YouTube chnaged everything. Before YouTube, music videos played a key role in creating an artists image and also selling the artist to an audience. However, after YouTube, their was a brief period of a few years in which no one wanted to spend money on making videos because they felt that it was an unnecessary extravagence that wasn't worth it, and obviously this was an issue for Passion Pictures whos main business partly lies in making music videos.

What does the Artist want or need?

• Hits, Hits, Hits (views)
• Controversy
• Noise
• Impact

The Brief

• The brief is there in order to take your ideas and to then justify these ideas in order for the video to make sense: their must be reason and purpose, this stops the video from looking amateur and creates a far more professional image.

The Director

The Directors job is to call the shots, instruct people on what he/she wants in the video. For example:

• Clothing
• Make up
• What is the set going to look like?
• What look do I want here? and so on...

The directors job is communicate the idea but it works best if this is done briefly, as it then becomes easier for everyone involved in the project to know exactly what their job is.

Another key bit of advice....

Oliver said that a vital piece of advice would be 'Don't fix it in post', as this can become more expensive and it is far more effective to resolve the problem their and then, not run away from it and forget about. It will also probably be easier to sort it out up front as well.

As an idea, he said that it doesn't need to be complicated at all, and that the most useful aproach would be to take it one step at a time, because no matter how complicated an idea may be, if you break it down then often you can find a logical and techincally sound way of creating something that has been imagined inside your head.

My question for Oliver

I asked Oliver if Passion Pictures predominently worked with larger artists rather than low key, new, up and coming artists. He told me that it was a mixture, however he prefered working with smaller artists as they usually have easier ideas to bring to life, and there is more room for manouver and more freedom. He justified this point by saying that the larger artitsts have a very specific image that they want to get across, and their ideas are massively complicated, therefore their is little room for individual creativity to be used by people working for Passion, as the big record labels prevent it from happening.

Treatment

Our concept consists of three main elements, a retro theme, a boom box, and a colour theme. Our three main girls (Salt N Pepa) will wear retro clothes, particularly three different block colours, green purple and orange, while everyone else wears denim, to show the girls are individual and glamourous. The main element of the music video is an enlarging boom box, starting off amongst buildings in a regular size, the boom box features throughout the video, set in all different scenarios. As the video progresses the boom box will gradually be introduced as bigger, eventually taking up the size of a building, showing that everyone is being attracted and entertained by the music. The colour theme is also reinforced through the coloured sets, and features in creative ways alongside the speaker, such as paint booming out of the speaker, as well as other coloured objects being bounced on the vibrations the speaker produces. Within the different scenes of the video there is also an ongoing dance element, with sections of choreography, reinforcing the glamorous girl-power, image Salt N Pepa give off. 

Salt N Peppa Album cover and Website campaign

Album Cover Design for Salt N Pepa                                    

The album cover for Shoop, is based mainly around a colourful wheel, which appears in the music video, we see all three of the women laying on it looking up to the camera, which is in a birds eye view position. The typography of the word Shoop is big and bubble writing like, in bright bubblegum pink. The name of the artist is less important here and is in smaller writing in the bottom right hand corner. The women clearly stand out and are the major selling point of the music. Their clothes are glamorous and statement pieces, paired with bold makeup, hair and accessories. The rest of the background is a baby blue, to compliment the pink writing. The wheel is multicoloured with each slice being a different bright colour. 

Website Campaign Design for Salt N Pepa

The website design is plain and simple, with a link leading to their main site, and all of their social media's. It also heavily features the girls and the wheel. The women would be dressed in similar matching denim out fits, with once again bold and glamorous hair, make and accessories etc... There is also a link under the wheel to instantly download the track, if the main focus of the browser is to download their most recent song.  

Salt n' Pepa: Shoop

Here is a Prezi, made by Grace, who will be in my group and making a music video with me alongside, Tyler and Elisa. We have now decided to go with this idea as a concept for a music video because of problems that arose with making a video for Havelock: Tom, Dick and Harry. The problem was that Hal has recently started at Manchester Uni, and would be unable to travel to Hurtwood in order to shoot the video. We thought about using someone else, however that would take away our main concept idea of shooting him at one of his gigs, with the legitimate atmosphere. So we decided to fall back onto plan B, and use 'Shoop' by Salt N Peppa.

There have been slight alterations however, to the idea talked about in the Prezi as we would like to keep a constant theme going throughout the video. We have decided to have a massive 60 ft speaker edited into the video, with shots of our performers dancing on top of it. We would also create a retro type feel, which fits with the era that the song was released in by having coloured panels in squares with bright light shining through creates a very 80's dance vibe.

We have also thought about who we would like to use in our video. For our main singer we would like to use Kemi, a friend of Grace's from London, and as backup vocals we would like to use Romany Henry, and a girl called Vogue. For our male dancers, we would like to use Ettiene Okabue, Ali Dangote and a boy called Rob.

Havelock: Tom, Dick and Harry

Jake Bugg

Ben Howard

https://soundcloud.com/havelock_music/tom-dick-harry

I wanted to use Havelock because he his a new artist and is little known by the general public. I know about him through a friend of mine and have been to see many of his gigs in pubs, clubs, and bars. His singing style is similar to the Kooks, who's genre is described as a Brtish Rock band. However, I would say that Havelock is more of an Indie Alternative artist, with some songs being slightly Pop Rock. As you can see from the image above who already has his own brand image, which is one of an organic artist, but shows potential to become a synthetic artist.

The Kooks

His image is very similar to that of Tom Odell, Jake Bugg, and Ben Howard.

Tom Odell

As an idea for a music video concept we were interested in filming him in a natural environment. That is why we are hoping to film him in live performance in November. This would fill the performance aspect of it and would have an atmosphere that cannot be re-created. As another aspect to the video, we would like to follow three friends, Tom, Dick and Harry. However, I think following Havelock (Hal) would be the main focus of the non-performance aspect of the video and we like the idea of filming him going about his business in Brighton, where his girlfriend lives at the moment, therefore he will be there often.

We like the idea of using Brighton as it has quite a vibrant, student vibe to it, which would fit his image nicely.






Here are some more photo's of Havelock,

The Brief

The Brief

A promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options:

                         

a website homepage for the band;

 

a cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package);

 

a magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).

Insitutional context of Shoop

PolyGram was the name of the major label recording company started by Philips and Siemens as a holding company for their music interests in 1979. The name was chosen to reflect the Siemens interest Polydor Records and the Philips interest, Phonogram. 

I chose to use this record label for our artist because it is an independant label, representing new, rising stars, however it is backed by a much bigger lable, with more resources.

Task 1: Charmaine by Plan B

Benjemin Paul Ballance-Drew is an English rapper, singer song-writer, better known as Plan B from Forest Gate in London. His first album, Who needs actions when you got words gave him wide spread critical acclaim and is the album that the single, 'Charmaine' was released with.  His image is quite organic, which is unusual for a Hip-Hop artist. However, it makes a nice change as we can see a down to earth person in something that can be quite an aggresive genre and culture. This can be seen in his album cover to the left and in his cover for The Defamation of Strickland Banks.

The Defamation of Stickland Banks

There is no existing music video for this track, which is one of the reasons that I am interested in using it. The song talks about a white 19 year old man meeting a young, mixed raced girl, getting her number and then taking her on a date..and so on.

Guildford train station

Gomshall train station

My idea is to create a narrative video that followed the lyrics. For example, the beginning of the video would follow the lyrics, The first day I saw her was at the train station, She was half black, half Caucasian. 

To do this we would shoot it at a train station, for obvious reasons. For this we could use either Guildford or the quieter Gomshall. The action in the video would be very low key, with man shots of a male character hanging out with a female character. As the song develops I would like to use camera shots to show the girls beauty as the lyrics describe her. For example, 'The best of both worlds, caramel complextion' and 'piercing green eyes, they shine like emeralds'. The lyrics progress to say, 'Train pulls up and we get on it together', therefore our timing would have to be precise if we were to fit the entire shoot into a day. Throughout this we would switch back to someone performing in the studio, with the two young lovers conversing in the background out of focus. When it comes to the chorus, I think that the studio would be best. 

Plan B or Ben Drew is signed with six Record labels that are, Warner Brothers Records, Atlantic Records, 679 Artists, Mercury Records, Asylum Records and Cordless Recordings. These record labels vary from independent labels to huge labels part of media conglomerates such as Warner Brothers Records, who are part of the Time Warner conglomerate. The reason that he has so many is because each company can sell his work in many different ways, for example, worldwide, local and sometimes to people outside of his demographic.

Plan B also has numerous fan made sites, however unlike many artist's, these fan sites aren't advertised on his official webpage. However, a simple google search can take you to many of them. I have looked at just three, and I can very quickly spot variations in them. For example, one is a very simple site that isn't very obviously a Plan B fansite, however another one created on FanPop is more detailed and can give fans much more information about the hip-hop/indie artist.

More detailed Fansit

Simple, and not particularly informative fan site

In terms of his social media channels, he has Twitter, Facebook and Souncloud accounts. All of which promote his music, but Twitter in particular allows his fans to see the 'real' Plan B, which, in reality, is likely to be a synthetic image helped to be put together by his marketing team. Nevertheless, it enables his fans to believe that they know what he likes to do with his time, what he finds amusing and so on, which creates a connection between artist and consumer.

Link to Facebook page

Plan B Twitter

Plan B Soundcloud