Alex Southam

Agile Films describe Alex Southam 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.’

He is a one man band, where he does all the camera, lighting, editing by himself, but now he uses a Director of Photography.

He likes to arrange his music videos as a way that, ‘you can try new techniques and can have real artistic freedom’. This is why he isn’t keen on commercials as they don’t allow his freedom. He uses Vimeo to showcase his videos, this is becoming an increasingly important platform for him. As it is seen to have a ‘higher status’ than YouTube.

His discovery came with the Tesselate video for Alt J, which had the budget of £10,000. The video was shot in one day and it had a large cast, it also contains the special effect called AfterEffect. 

The whole video is a recreation of the 'School of Athens' painting.






The video starts starts with 4 extreme close ups of  two pairs of eyes, a t-shirt and fingers. Which the 5th close up being a bit faster with the girl standing with two boys. 









The video seems to be showing young people in a negative light, as it shows clips of boys fighting, girls in dancing in a sexual way and images associated with gang members. 









The lost and found video, by Chase and Status had a £50,000 budget and was shot in Los Angeles using a Steadicam. It had 36 frames per second which was then slowed down. Its influence is Massive Attack’s Unfinshed Sympathy that went for an early 1990s VHS video look. 






Unfinished Sympathy was filmed on Pico Avenue in Los Angeles 1991. It was the first ever promo music video to be done in one take. The original ending of the video was to do a, wide angled camera shot, that would slowly crane over the hosuing levels of the street. Although the cameraman was too tired and it became a quick fade-out instead.