Presentation from Polydor Records

Last week my classmates and I received a talk from Polydor Records about the pre-production, production and post-production stages of making a music video along with some advice with making ours. We received the talk from a two woman named Hanan Cher and Emily Tedrake (who was the video commissioner for Polydor Records). Below is some of the information they gave to us: 

• When thinking on what directors to use in the video they go to about 5-10 different directors to compare and chose the best for that video.
• The director will then create and they will put together a weeks worth of documents in vision for the music video.
• Compared to our videos with the minimal budget we have to create our product Polydor Records' videos aren't not studio set up and they are able to travel to different locations for the best possible video.
• Throughout the presentation/interview the term treatment was used a lot. The term treatment means script/idea for the video and it is made as visual as possible to make them as realistic as possible (vivid) for the artist and everyone involved with the production.
• Due to Polydor Records and how large of a company they are they have many options and directors to chose from as they come from companies which they work with.
• New directors which are used (directors which Polydor hadn't worked with before) are looked at through many different places (on and offline).
• Due to the rage of budgets which Polydor can do, a small budgeted one uses around 10 people in a production team but can be as small as 3.
• There is no point depending on a specific storyboard and that we should be flexible because not all videos go exactly like the storyboard (things may look different. However having one or a good idea of what we want would be very helpful.
• If there isn't then you can lose track of timings and spending too long on one scene rather than the others which may be longer, messing up the shoot day.
• Finally one main piece of information is that we must have a clear treatment.

All of this information can be used effectively by my group and I if we use this knowledge given to us from Polydor in our own shoots to make sure things run smoothly and productively on our day.

What do Hanan and Emily do at the shoots?

Their main aim is to just to help, in any way they can, on the shoot. They also give advice to the directors if anything is needed.

Make sure that the artist's are okay and to check is the director is on track. They also, overall, give communication across the set, for example, there are always things and liabilities which just need to be smoothed out on the set. They make sure there is no panic as that can cause a large disruptions and finally the artist, sometimes, doesn't like it and reshoots do happen.