A talk on music video company Polydor

Today in our media lesson we had a woman Emily come in to talk about her job, she creates and plans music videos for the record label Pollydore and has worked with the delights of Lana Del Ray, Ellie Golding and many more amazing professional artists.
She emphasised the importance of the music track fitting the idea, she always is given a song and tries to get a feel for the tone and the artist in order to capture a video that relates to the artist and the song, instead of horseshoeing an idea into a video.
She said that using video references, images and influences is a good way to get your idea across, instead of having a very dense wordy brief.
She showed us a variety of music videos she had done and told us about them.

Ellie Goulding - Burn's budget was £60,000 with 100+ extras and shot for the whole day till 3am. I liked how they shot bits in 50 frames as it gave it a different speed and look which gave a stylistic element to the video.


First Time Caller by White lies was a lower budget at £15,000 as it was a lower key video which was simple but still very effective. I really like mixture of the performance of the band and the cuts of the narrative as they flow well together and give the video a creative uniqueness.

Overgrown by James Blake was created by NABIL, the budget was £30,000, they shot the video in LA over three days so it was a big production, but the end result looks amazing and fits the song perfectly. There are lots of elements in this video that are intreeging and catch your interest which makes you want to watch it over and over again.

The 1975 Sex video was my favourite; it was interesting as the band originally had a video for the song before it became very famous, it was just a performance video of the band. However they decided to recreate the video when the song became more popular, suggesting that a mixture of performance with other strands such as narrative and stylistic elements make a better, more successful video as it is more visually engaging and popular instead of just performance. Their budget for their new video was £55,000 which is fairly high compared to most of the others, however there is a lot going on throughout the video which makes it understandable as the final outcome looks so interesting and professional.


She gave us some really good advise which I will take into account when creating our video. The performance and the band should be cohesive; the continuity needs to remain the same and fit everything together as a whole body of work. The video needs to fit the tone and feel of the artist and the song. The pace of the editing should be interesting and not repetitive, cutting to the beat to make the look polished, fitting the song and the image together. Adding new locations/scenes in throughout the video makes it less repetitive and more visually exciting as a lot is going on so it makes you want to watch it again and again.