Polydor Production Records Company Talk

POLYDOR PRODUCTIONS

In todays lesson we had two members of Polydor's Records team who are the two music video commissioners, based and located in Kensington, London.

Their main line of work is mainly focused on the making of music videos and overseeing the process in which it takes to make the final product which is created. To help give us a good oversight of what they do and illustrate examples of the treatments they've received from directors on different projects, they handed out and gave us some booklets to overlook and share with examples of storyboards and test shots to gain a good visual understanding of their line of work. 

WHAT THEY DO:

When the commissioners are shown a track for a potential video, they firstly discuss with the artist what the initial track/single will be and how they want the final outlook to look like to then create a small briefing of the clear idea they want about the song. This is then followed on by the budge which is based on the expectation of the sales of the track in the future. After all this finalising they then discuss with the artists, managers and directors to make sure they do their job properly by making sure everyone's expectations are on the same page at the end of the day.

After the initial briefing is complete, the commissioners then have the task of choosing directors do work with depending on the style, genre, budget and the team. To do this process they sent out the brief to around 5-10 directors, then, after a couple of weeks those directors respond with their treatment, each different to each other giving a variety of choices to choose from. From getting a track and then delivering the actual final video it normally takes around 2 months for the process to be completed. However, they also said how that the radio has a lot of power with dictating what the viewers and audience will listen too depending on whether or not the sales increase, for example if the sales of a song which has been playing on the radio for a couple of weeks doesn't change, then the radio station will stop playing it all together and therefore probably stop the sales of the track all-together. 

EXAMPLES OF THEIR WORK:

The music video YEARS AND YEARS BY KING is one of the most successful current products Polydor Records have created at the moment. They showed the treatment and storyboard of this track to show us an example of how similar the storyboard was to the final product which is actually very rare nowadays. They went with the initial idea of wanting to capture the audiences attention immediately as soon as the track started by using visuals which are essential in a music video to make unique and entertaining. The video was shot in L.A. with the commissioners being present on set during the shoot as they were in charge of making sure everything was going well on the day and everyone taking part was happy with what they were doing, not the most easiest job when the whole process of creating the video is hard enough already. The budget was around the average UK budget between 30-40 grand.

                                                                                                                                                              

Another video that Polygon Records has created is Wiley ft Lucky Charms - Skank.  Before filming in South Africa - the  team of commissioners had done a research into subcultures of South African citizens to make the video more believable .