Polydor

Today we had a lady (Emily) come and talk to us about Polydor. I wrote down some of the things that she said to us and have put her exact words in quotations. She recieves a lot of treatments everyday. The process they go through is she gets given a track from an artist - 'A lot of the time now they get reaction from Radio 1 and if it gets a bad reaction this can affect whats decided' - the band are already signed by management, they talk about the budget which depends on how many records they think they will sell. 'It's important that the singles right before they invest the money into it'. They then get together with the artist, management and the label and talk about the video. When they talk about the video they decide whether it will be narrative or performance based etc.. or they would just say any ideas that they had thought of. They would then put what they talked about as a brief and send it out to video directors who were given about a week to make a video. 'The process is quite quick'. They would then meet with the band and see what the band thinks and a joint deicison will be made (by the label, management and artist). There is a week inbetween making the video so that they can prep for it and then the production company put together the shoot and edit it and deliver it back to the label. This will all get approved by the band. We had a look at three original treatments (ones that were used to make the music videos) for Take That 'The Flood', Lana Del Ray 'Born to Die' and Cheryl Cole 'Parachute'. They were all very visual and she said that it was important that the idea was written simply so that it was understandable from the offset (this was especially important in the first sentence about the summary of the video - it should be clear straight away).

Lana Del Ray is just one of the artists that has used the label. She works on her own videos and worked with Yoann Lemoine (Katy Perrys Teenage Dream video) to talk through ideas for the song 'Born to Die' and he created the treatment for the idea. It was quite a brief treatment but because of the fact tha the artist (Lana) was involved in this idea and had talked to him before about it, it got used. There was two tigers in the video which was actually one that they mirrored - this was all shot seperately from the shots of Lana. She however wanted a white tiger but this wasn't possible - many artists are sometimes awkward so this is an obstacle that you have to get through. Below is a screen shot of this shot of her next to the tigers which were added during editing. By having tigers it shows that you shouldn't limit your ideas - 'Anything is possible'. The label put £40,000 into this 3 day shoot. By them investing this much money into a video they must make sure that they get it just right so that the artist uses it because sometimes they can turn around after for example a 3 day shoot and decide to refuse to use the video. This would obviously be very annoying after spending so much time and money into getting it just right.

 

 

 

Cheryl Coles 'Parachute' had a budget of £80,000 and this was a one day shoot. There was no 'double' used in her video which I found surprsing, but she actually did all of the dancing therefore this required rehearsals which is something that the artist must agree to do when deciding what the video will consist of. In her video she used product placement. There were a few close-up shots of this watch (below is a print screen of it), this is different to the artist Lana Del Ray who refuses to do this in any of her videos. This shows how different artists really vary in whats important to them and what they want to show. Also you can see in this print screen how it is using VEVO (instead of YouTube). This is because VEVO has advertisement so every time it gets viewed there is some money from it.

 

 

The treatment that they used for the track 'The Flood' was very detailed, it had pictures of the kind of tone that wanted to be created, it was very specific - said about what shots exactly and about lighting. The treatment included a mood video - this video reference really makes a difference as it makes the ideas come to life and you can really get a feel for it. By looking at the mood video and the original video for Take That you could see just how similar they were and this showed just how specific and spot on the mood video was. 'The Flood' had a budget of £150,000 and was a 3 day shoot. They shot first thing in the morning so that there were no crowds. And the scenes which had crowds in them were shut off shoot locations. The band actually had the idea of rowing so it was partly there idea. They also had rowing lessons in order to make it look believable - this is similar to Cheryl Cole having her dance rehearsals - you must make sure they are willing to do this and also talk to them about possibly getting them to do something physical before saying no to that idea because they might surprise you and be up for it. It was very interesting having Emily come in and talk to us as we got to understand the links between the label, the band and the production company. Also hearing about all of the people that use Polydor - Ellie Goulding, Jessie J, The Saturdays and more. She also emphasised the importance of having a good work relationships with the artists/bands.