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.