Blog 10 - Case Study 1

Jamie Thraves - Director

Jamie Thraves is a music video director and has directed many very popular as well as memorable music video's in his time as a music video director and producer. for example "Just" - Radiohead, "Scientist" - coldplay etc. 

Jamie Thraves made short films in university and was so good at these short films that he won an award for one of them and he used this award winning short film as his calling card for getting into the music video production business. He is trying to use his career as a music video director and producer as his gateway into his real dream job of being a film maker. 

However being in the music video production industry is not a very stable job as you will only get paid if you get work from musicians and there is no guarantee that you will always be getting work or that musicians will even like your work.

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This was Jamie Thraves first major music video production and it had a budget of £100,000. If we refer this to the work of Roland Barthes we can see that many of the music video characteristics that we distinguished by Roland Barthes are used throughout this video. For example the music video is an "open text" this is because the music videos context and narrative has no ending, and the ending it provides is incredibly vague leaving us(he audience)questioning what actually happened or in this case, what the man on the floor actually said. This video also contained disjuncture throughout its narrative, because the music itself had near to nothing to do with the actual video that is playing at the same time. Lastly "amplification" is used throughout the video as the phrase "Why are you lying here??" is constantly being repeated. 

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The next major production that Jamie Thraves directed, was that of "Scientist" by Coldplay. This production had a budget of £200,000 and was shot in under 3 days. This is a very interesting video in terms of how it was recorded because the entire video is in reverse but with the main singer stil mouthing the lyrics of the song, to do this the singer would have to mouth the words backwards in the recording process of the music video, this is a very unique idea that no one had used before this. much like the Radio head video and he oldtimey, foreign style subtitles and interesting ending or rather the lack of one. 

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Jamie's tips:

Jamie himself said that there is a set way that people should go about analysing his videos and these are.

• Listen to the lyrics of the song and compare them to what is happening in the video but do not be too literal in analyzing every single lyrics that you hear. 
• Most importantly try to feel the emotion that is being put across by both the music and the videos narrative that is being put across by Jamie Thraves. 

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Lastly he directed this very famous new song by Tom Odell called "Another Love" this much like jammie thraves other music videos have a very bold uniquenes about them, the entire of this video is just the singer Tom Odell sitting in a chair singing the song while numerous events happen around him that cease to affect him or his zone that he is in. This is not used in other videos as it is not seen as very "pretty" or nice to look at but in this case it works as the song it self is very sad and emotional so the dark tinted camera theme as well as the narrative of this video correlate extremely well with the song. This song also contains a few of Goodwins characteristics of pop songs with the most easily recognizable being the use of a close up at the very beginning of the video. Make it very clear who this song is written by.