Task 3 - Music Video Director Research

Francis Lawrence

Francis Lawrence was born on March 26th 1971 in Vienna, Austria. He grew up in Los Angeles from age 3 and quickly became interested in filmmaking as he grew up. He is an American music video director and film director (I am Legend, Constantine). He has worked with big name stars on over 100 videos such as Britney Spears, Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, and so on.
Prior to receiving his bachelor degree in Film Production at Loyola Marymount University Film School, he worked as a 2nd assistant camera on the feature "Pump Up The Volume" which was directed by Allan Moyle. He then went on to work as 1st AD on the feature "Marching Out Of Time" directed by Anton Vassil. After graduation, he began shooting videos for an independent label owned by an old friend; in just 5 years he was shooting videos for some of the biggest artists in the business. He shot his first music video for Tidal Force "A Man Rides Through", and he soon became known for his original music video scripts and became a success. By 2004 Lawrence had established his own name and a good reputation as one of the most visually talented music video directors around.
His debut feature film was Constantine, released in 2005 starring Keanu Reeves, and the follow up was I am Legend, released in 2007 starring Will Smith, with who he had worked with on a music video.
Along the way Lawrence has won numerous awards for his work, including MTV awards and the 2002 MVPA Director of the Year award. He has also directed adverts for big name companies, including that of Covergirl and McDonalds. Doing these adverts are which helped to break him into the film industry and show the critics that he is capable of directing big movies along with music videos.
His music videos are all of different genres, which shows he is versatile and capable of putting his ideas and knowedge of the music industry into tracks of different genres and still manage to make them look good on the screen. An example of this would be Aerosmith "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing", compared to Gwen Stefani "What You Waiting For?". In my opinion, the fact that Lawrence can create two videos of a high standard from different genres makes him stand out from the crowd. There isn't many music directors that can successfully direct videos of different genres; for example, Chris Cunningham directs the same sort of videos every time he directs one. They are always theatrical, weird and not what you would expect. Whereas Lawrence's videos are all different in style and concept. Gwen Stefani's video is completely different to Black Eyed Peas video for "Let's Get it Started". His work is always different in every video, which I think is a rare talent. I think he is extremely talented in what he does, and I think he's extraordinary.
One of my favourite videos Francis Lawrence has directed would be Pink's "Just Like a Pill". This is because there are so many different shots in this video, and I find it very interesting to watch. This video itself does not simply cut from scene to scene, it will move around in a clockwise / anti-clockwise way in time with the music. This is a very clever technique because it is not something that every director uses; it makes the transitions very smooth and keeps your attention hooked. Lawrence also uses a similar technique throughout the Black Eyed Peas "Let's Get It Started" video.

Comments from the audience of Pink's video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi8_CsjCtCg&feature=related) include:

This video is really artistic! Love it!

LOVE THE VIDEO ONE WORD AWSOME!!!!

Fantastic video, one of the best I have seen, the camerawork is awsome!

The audience responses from Lawrence's videos are mostly positive, but sometimes they don't understand what the video is trying to tell them. The videos don't always link to the music, which I think is what can drag down Lawrence's work at times; the audience aren't seeing a connection, and therefore they aren't going to love the video as much as they could.
After researching Lawrence, I decided that his recent music video for Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" (researched in task 2) was my favourite, hands down. I loved the way he made an unusual concept come to life and make sense; something that other directors may not have been able to do and make it look as brilliant as it does. The amount of views the video has received on YouTube is amazing (over 100 million) just goes to show how his work alongside Lady Gaga has impacted and made a huge impression on people from all over the world.

This man is a genius.

Of his video for Black Eyed Peas "Let's Get It Started" I saw a number of varied comments about the video:



Cool song but bad video

LOVE THE SONG, LOVE THE VIDEO!

Great song, weird video

The songs good but I don't get the vid

This was a small selection of user comments from the video. It's very mixed, and I think this was partly due to music channels asking them to censor the songs actual title (let's get retarded), thus the video had nothing to do with the song. Sometimes this can work, but I think that in this case, it didn't and could have benefited from a video that had some sort of link to the music.
Another music video I particularly like that Lawrence has directed is Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing".



The song is from the soundtrack to "Armaggedon". It starts off in space, and pans forwards towards the Earth, and begins to get quicker just before the lyrics kick in; this is where it continues faster and ends up in a performance room with the band performing their song to the camera. It comes back to this scene repeatedly throughout the video, alongside scenes from the film. Other things I noticed about the video would be that Lawrence has taken scenes from the film and put Aerosmith's images across them (1:23), giving a link from the video to the music. He has made it as though the characters are watching Aerosmith perform the song (1:32), which was another nice link from video to music. Comments from users include:

This is a awesome vid.

Awesome song with an awesome vid.

Wonderful song, wonderful video.

As you can see, this video has positive comments, and the video is well loved. I do think that this is contributed from having a video that links to the music and has a connection; it's more likely to make sense and get people interested. It also helps that it's a well loved song and film, so the video would probably get good comments even if it wasn't this good.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1349376/otherworks
http://www.moviefone.com/celebrity/francis-lawrence/2043958/main January 15th - 1:45pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Lawrence January 15th - 1:45pm
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1808537229/bio January 15th - 2:10pm
http://www.tribute.ca/people/Francis+Lawrence/11902 January 17th - 6:40pm
http://imdb.com/ February 1st - 8:40
http://youtube.com/ February 1st - 8:40