Ed Lovelace Talk

Today in the first period of the day we had a talk and a showing of some of his work from Ed Lovelace, an ex student at Long road who went on to Bournmouth University to study film.

During the talk we watched a few of his videos from his carreer at Pulse Films, which him and one of his friends from University set up. We saw two music videos that he did for the band 'Cage the Elephant', I personally really liked how both of these were done, with very unique style to them and some very good angles with the camera. I really liked the music video for the song 'In one Ear' (Video below)

I really like the set that had been built for this video, the style of the camera work and the editing also. I like the very sudden jolt of the camera that was used when certain beats in the song were played, this is an effect that I want to have the oppotunity to be able to re-create in some of my own work.

The other two music videos that we saw of his were also very good, using shoestring budgets to create something simple and yet extremely effective. Using only £100 to create a music video for smaller bands and being able to have the oppotunity to make that music video. On one occasion he was asked to make a video in a two hour window at approximately 2am before the band went on tour. He managed to plan the video for about a week in advance, and shot the whole video in a way that made it look like it was done in one shot, using breakers in the scene to hide the cuts that were made, such as walls that could be repeated and stitched together to look seemless.

He talked about his time at university, and that when he was there he managed to make allot of new friends that all shared a similar interest. Ed mentioned that when you get out into the media industry like he has, most of the work is freelance, and that if you are on your own when doing it; that sometimes it can get a bit lonely, so teaming up with a partner or a group of friends from university was a good idea, being able to stay in a team that are all interested in the work and are committed to getting it all done.

Something else that he talked about was being a runner for a media company, he had a work placement in his second year at Bournmouth, being a runner for 6 weeks, he says that this is not a good carreer starter, because all that you seem to end up doing is making cups of tea for staff members.

He has started work on a feature film called 'Warewolves across america', based on a homeless folk artist that goes around and plays shows in peoples' front rooms, the artist actually ran away from home at 14 or 15 and has been playing gigs around america for 17 years. Ed went around america with him for 2 months, filming lots of footage of him playing shows in peoples front rooms. The film is based half on a documentary of the artist and half on fiction. It will be shown across small cinemas in america and london, doing the film festival circuit before trying to work its way into the bigger streams.

Ed hopes to be able to get into the feature film industry in the near future, he talked about how he has been influenced by Michel Gondry's film 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', and how he wanted to reference the film in some of his music videos, but because it is such a conceptual film and that allot of people want to do the same and being able to get the permission is now very hard.

Overall I think that Ed Lovelace is a pretty cool character, having the oppotunity to work on the music videos that he has seems like a really good opportunity in any media carreer, I think that he has done very well, and I personally like almost all of his work. I would like to have the chance to work on music videos like the ones that he has worked on in the future.