Constitutional
Constitutional
Constitutional
Constitutional
Constitutional
Robектор
Mr President and
Mr President
and Mr President
Mr President,
Mr President
Mr President
If I could just like hold a stick the whole time.
This feels very calendar.
Hi, I'm Alex Turvey, I'm a filmmaker born and raised in the UK and now living in Los
Angeles.
Yeah?
You would never talk to me straight, you would always give up, and you were letting it swump
around and up, killing like a pile, but oh, I was your mom.
So yeah, my career path into music radio direction has happened fairly organically over the past
few years.
I studied graphic design, I was pretty much raised on like illustration, I would occasionally
make films when I was a kid, when my uncle had a video camera, so when he would come
to visit my family in Cornwall, I would go off and try and shoot some kind of weird like
B-movie horror, but really I never studied film, so over the past few years and since
working in the film industry and working in the music video industry kind of professionally,
my focus has been on I guess letting go of the rules of design and transitioning into
the medium of film whilst trying to retain the visual, the voice that I had created in
the design world.
So the music video community in both the UK and Los Angeles really from my experience
seemed to mirror each other, there's this universal sense of collaboration that's I think as we're
all essentially going through the same struggle of like fighting against small budgets, everyone's
pushing the medium as far as they can go and everyone wants each other to succeed, that's
really exciting because I feel like I'm in this completely alien environment so far away
from home yet everything feels so similar and comfortable in a sense.
Growing up in Cornwall, I want to be in a city but it's important for me to be surrounded
by I guess dramatic natural environments, always has been, that's what I'm accustomed
to, that's what inspired me as a kid, so and as I want to create more cinematic work and
I want to really kind of explore film outside of the studio as a lot of my earlier work
is based in studios and based around kind of heavily constructed sets, it feels like
an appropriate environment for me to be in.
So my design background has definitely played a huge part in my creative process over the
years and had a huge influence in I guess the way I approach your treatment and music
video treatment in the earlier work, so for example if I took a project like Cheetahs
which was entirely based around creating this living breathing set and then placing the
artist within that, very minimal performance from the artist, the set essentially told
the story and just kind of cocooned him, now my process has completely shifted over the
years as I've really tried to relinquish control of the design aspect of my work and then focus
more on the performance.
The artist's performance was completely out of my control as I created an environment
that they inhabited and they were unaware entirely of what they were about to see on
the day of the shoot so they essentially enter a black room, their instruments in front
of them, they play, they perform, they react however they want to, it's just one take
and I cover that but what they're seeing is something I've created for them, it's an environment
I've created for them.
So they're giving me their performance without any direction and I'm giving them the environment
to perform in without any control or comments from their side so it's only a creative direction
from their side so that was a really interesting way of balancing the two.
Finally I directed a video for an artist called Twin Shadow for a track called Turn Me Up.
That was a key point of my music video career I guess in the sense that as this video entirely
focused on George Lewis Jr's performance and nothing else really, the whole video is based
around the idea of stripping George back to the rawest representation of himself and that's
done through using reflection and lots of kind of in-camera techniques that do relate
back to techniques that I have developed through previous videos, more experimental videos
and more art-led videos but I appropriated these to the performance itself and used them
just to support the performance.
With I think my most recent project Hishi Mi which is a music video slash fashion film
for Selfridges which I collaborated with a director called Catherine Ferguson on.
We commissioned the actual track for that piece but also what was I think the most important
thing about that video was that we were focusing entirely on the cast, like the human elements
to that video is the core of everything, the message behind that video so essentially we
are focusing on Hari Neff as she enters this world that's completely inhabited by these
incredible individuals and the direction we gave them was so minimal we just lay out a
path for them, there are elements of design that I guess like there are like small signatures
within that environment that could relate back to my earlier work but it is almost just
like decoration and it's so minimal compared to the way I approached the project before.
This is entirely driven by human performance and that for me was so exciting to just be
part of because we did shot that as a one shot and it was almost like creating a theatre
piece where we'd sit back and just watch the monitor and watch each take without any feedback
and then afterwards feedback but it was just like this thrilling experience to let go completely
of the I guess the structured like storyboarded process that I'm familiar with and rely entirely
on what the performers were giving us as you kind of transition through these different
people and different like situations and vignettes.
Thank you.
