For me, it was pretty easy to choose a music director to look at, as a large majority of my favourite music videos were directed by Roman White. I knew him before our A2 project had begun, so once I heard we had to choose a music director, my first thought went to him. As you can see on the right hand side of my blog, I have listed a few of my favourite videos, and a few of them e.g. Mine - Taylor Swift, You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift and Just A Dream - Carrie Underwood were all directed by him.
The majority of Roman's videos are narrative based, with aspects of performances within. Some of his videos, e.g. You Belong With Me and Just A Dream are completely narrative based, without any shots of just pure performance. The artists still lipsync to the songs, but are in character the whole time so the music video is more of a short story than a music video.
As you can see in Taylor Swift's video for You Belong With Me, Roman's style is very literal, with the video being exactly what you would expect from the song; about a nerdy shy girl who sees the boy of her dreams with the wrong girl. However, unlike the actual song, we get a resolution to the story, with the boy telling her that he loves her back.
And as you may already know, this was the music video which won 'Best Female Video' at the 2009 MTV VMAs where the 'Kanye West incident' occured.
However most of his videos do have both narrative and performance, but while cross cutting between two, narrative is more emphasised with more screen time.
As we can see from Carrie Underwood's video for Last Name, again the narrative is the most emphasised and goes along with the lyrics, but there are also some shots where Carrie sings straight into the camera, showing the performance aspects of the song.
Roman has worked with many different artists, but as we can see from the two videos above, the main genre which he seems to make videos for our Country. (If you look at his website http://romanwhite.com/ he has a link for his videos made for Pop or Rock artists, and one link just for Country itself.) I think one of the main reasons for this is because a lot of Country music is about telling a story, with lyrics which can easily be transmitted to screen, which is a large part of White's style.
He in fact did Carrie Underwood's whole set of music videos, with some continuing on from eachother, as if they were all short episodes of a tv programme. The video for Before He Cheats is almost like the next episode of Carrie's relationship with the character in the video from Last Name, with the two beginning's of the videos being the same, with the vandalism of his car. I particularly liked how all of her videos were made to link on with eachother, for example as you may have also noticed, the beginning of Last Name had the caption 'Three Months Earlier (Before He Cheated)', showing not only the continuation of the story, but also adding the title of her other single for promotion. This video for Before He Cheats also won Video Of The Year at the 2007 CMT Awards.
A few of White's videos also include some CGI and animation, and when he does, the themes of nature, swirls and textures come up a lot, for example in Fifteen - Taylor Swift, That Year - Brandie Carlile, and Don't Waste Your Time - Kelly Clarkson
Finally, as you can see from a lot of the videos and gifs above, a large majority of his videos include a lot of bright and rich colours, especially for all the beauty shots in his videos. Below are a few screencaps from some of his other music videos, including: All The Way Up - Emily Osment, One Less Lonely Girl - Justin Bieber and I Want Somebody - Kristin Chenoweth.
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