CASE STUDY 3 Alex Southam

Alex Southam

Has worked for Agile Films who describe him on their website as:

‘Alex Southam is 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 begin with Southam undertook all the tasks on his videos this included doing the Camera work, Lighting and Editing. He now uses a Director of Photography.

Southam likes the format of music videos as, ‘you can try new techniques and can have real artistic freedom’

He is less keen on commercials as they allow for ‘much less freedom’

 He uses Vimeo to showcase his videos – this is becoming an increasingly important platform as it is considered to have ‘higher status’ than YouTube

His breakthrough came with the video Tesselate for Alt J, the budget of the video was £10,000, he shot it all in one day with a large cast. For the special effects used in the video, Southam used AfterEffects.

Another music video that Southam made was of Chase & Status’ “Lost and Not Found”. He was given a £50,000 budget to work with. Southam filmed the video in Los Angeles. He used a steadicam throughout the video to reduce the camera shaking. Throughout this, the video was filmed at 36 frames per second and then was slowed down. It was influenced by Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”. Southam went for an early 1990s VHS video look.