Alex Southam

Alex Southam has worked for Agile Films described him as an exciting new talent, working in a dizzying variety of styles across live action and animation. Entirely self-taught, his inventiveness and creativity have caught the eye with a series of diverse promos for the likes of the Walkmen, Alt+J and Lianne La Havas. Alex joined Agile in August 2012.’

To begin with Southam undertook all the tasks on his videos

• Camera
• Lighting
• Editing
• Now uses a Director of Photography

Southam likes the format of music videos as, ‘you can try new techniques and can have real artistic freedom’. He is less keen on commercials as they allow for ‘much less freedom’. He uses Vimeo to showcase his videos – this is becoming an increasingly important platform as it is considered to have ‘higher status’ than YouTube.

His breakthrough came with the video Tesselate for Alt J

• Budget: £10,000
• 1 day shoot
• Large cast
• Special effects – used AfterEffects

               

As there have been edits used and a huge cast, the entire video doesn't exactly make sense. Whilst watching this video, I could not see how the video was related to the song. The entire video consisted of woman dressed in very tight or showing outfits, dancing around the men. Laura Mulvey's theory can be applied to this video due to the way the woman are dressed and also how the men are looking at them.



Chase & Status – Lost and Not Found

• £50,000 budget
• Filmed Los Angeles
• Used Steadicam
• Filmed at 36 frames per second then slowed down
• Influenced by Massive Attack’s Unfinshed Sympathy
• Went for an early 1990s VHS video look

           

This music video was very interesting as the whole thing was filmed in one long shot.  There are only a few edits throughout the video, which give clues as to what is happening in the story.  The video is slightly related to song as we think that the girl is missing however, we then find that she is running away with a criminal.  The twist makes it more interesting and you can see that a big budget was used to film it.