Polydor records is a record label owned by Unviersal Music Group based in the UK. Emily began her career by studying fine art painting at unitversity as she orgionally wanted to be a photographer. She then got an unpaid internship at Polydor and now, after seven years, works as their head of commissioning editing.
Emily commissions music videos for artists as big as Ellie Goulding & James Blake, she has also worked with Take That and Lana Del Rau. Emily begins her process by sending out requests to directors for treaments, with a small budget, she will usually ask 10 different directors. Emily pointed out that she will always make sure that the artist is in the video as it will help promote their star image and it is also important to synchronise the video with the image.
Emily then gave us an idea of how the music video commissioning process works:
The budget can vary from anything between £1,000 to £100,000, the budget is set by the record label based on how big the artist is, for example record sales and recouped monies. The music video is a promotional tool, a part of the marketing campaign and this money takes some time to get back, technically the artist should pay 50% of the budget back after they make sales from it.
Artists work on 360˚ deals, this is a deal between an artist and a music industry company where they agree to provide the finacial support for the artist not actually from selling the album but from singles, concerts and merchandise.
An example of a video commissioning process is Ellie Goulding's 'Burn':
The process of this music video took between 1-2 months with a £60,000 budget. Initially Emily presented the treatment to Ellie Goulding, this is a collection of images which are used to explain the content of the idea. Adding specific references for the look of the video, explaining the specific location, analysing how you are going to shoot the video all makes the treatment clearer for presenting to the artist. Ellie Goulding's shoot took 15 hours, shooting from about 12pm to 3am and was shot on a military base in the UK where they were shut down at 3am; they shot the video at double the speed and then slowed it down in editing so that the filming process is quicker. The structure of this video worked really well as there was high energy and lots of colour, making the video exciting and interesting.
A second video which Emily was involved in was James Blake's 'Overgrown':
Emily explained how this was one of her favourite videos to do, due to the simplicity of it. The video was shot in a studio in LA over 2 days with a budget of £30,000. The director of the music video was Nabil Elderkin who is a professional photographer, music video and film director. He is associated with Frank Ocean and Kanye West. There was lots of work done in post production, for example the scene filmed in the cabin was actually in the studio, they did this because they wanted the effect of time passing by and the lighting that would reflect this. The starry sky was also shot in post production. This highly contrasts to Ellie's video, which was high scale energy and colour.
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