Case study 3 - Alex Southam

 Alex Southam was trained as a lawyer and studied law at University. He found it dull and boring and decided to start again and begin a career in music video production. His initial idea was to start making music videos to learn the trade in order to transfer to film production. Has worked for Agile Films who describe him on their website 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 start with, Alex took on all aspects of music video production including the camera, lighting, editing and everything else all by himself. He now uses a director of Photography.  Alex likes the format of music videos. He feels there is real freedom and you can do anything you want. He is less keen of shooting commercials because he feels there is far less creative freedom and no room for personal expression. He uses Vimeo to showcase his projects and videos. Vimeo is seen as more respectable than Youtube and this is an important point that he makes a point of using Vimeo instead of Youtube.

 Alex made his impact with the video for "Tesselate" by Alt J which took only one day to shoot and cost £10,000. He used many special effects which attracted much attention.

Chase and status "Lost and found" has a £50,000 budget, it was filmed in LA.
It was filmed at 36 frames a second and then played slowly for a distinctive effect which gave it the 1990's VHS look and there was only three edits in the entire video