Case Studies on Alex Southam

His Career

While working for Agile Films in 2012, Alex Southam was described as being "an exciting new talent working in a dizzying variety of styles across live action and animation". He was able to teach himself and has shown signs of being inventive and very creative and have caught the eye of many, with a series of diverse promos, for companies such as "Walkman" and people such as "Lianne La Havas".

His Style

In his early career, Alex wanted to do all of his work himself. He wanted to be his own "One Man Band" as he did all of the tasks himself. He used to setup and film all of the camera work himself. He also organised the lighting in the way that he liked it, and then he also edited all of the footage that he had captured himself. He wanted to make sure that the videos that he creates were all of his own work and that he could take full credit for the creation of his videos. Now, that he is much more well known, he employs a director of photography in order to help him with his camera and lighting work.
Alex Southam liked to use his own kind of style when making his new music videos. He liked to come up with new things that no one had ever used before and he liked using new techniques and giving the artist freedom when deciding how the music video should be. He never really liked the idea of using commercials as he feels that it restricted the artists in a way that doesn't allow for them to have as much freedom. Instead of using YouTube to show off his videos, he instead uses the website "Vimeo" as he feels that it has higher status than YouTube and is becoming increasingly popular in the music industry.


His Works




His first big video was the song "Tessellate" by alt-J. He had a budget of £10,000 for this video and was able to film all of the scenes that he needed in just one day. He had a very large cast in this video and was able to use special effects in this video. There isn't really a storyline to this video as it consists of a lot of people just standing about doing nothing. This suggests a disjuncture with regards to the music and visuals. With regards to Goodwin's theory, there are a lot of close ups of the cast, and even the animals in the video have close ups. This would be a demand of the record label. With regards to Laura Mulvey's theory, it could be argued that woman are the objects of male erotic desire as most of the women in this video are wearing tight clothing, or clothing that shows off their body.





Another one of his more famous videos is the song "Lost & Not Found" by Chase & Status. This video had a budget of £50,000 and was set in Los Angeles, California. It was filmed using a Steadicam, and was initially filmed at 36 frames per second instead of the normal 24, and then was ultimately slowed down in the editing process. Also, there are only three shots in the whole video, which shows that hardly any editing went into the making of this video. Alex Southam done this as he tried to go back to using an early 1990's VHS video look, and could be considered as trying to bring an old technique back, and using it as being new. With regards to Goodwin's theory, there are quite a few closeups of the cast in the video. There is no mention of Laura Mulvey's theory as women are not the objects of erotic desire.