Music Video Directors

The role of the director is to obviously produce and coordinate the promotional music video.A director controls a film's artistic potential whilst guiding the technical team what to do in the in terms of audio or visual capture. The director is responsible for overseeing creative aspects of a music video under the producer's advice and guidance. The director also plays an important role in the post production editorial. 

They work with the chosen editor to make sure that the shots utilized in the scene appropriately reflect which character is driving the narrative. The director also advises on the colour contrasts of the final images, adding brightness or darkening the colours to the fit the composition of the shots to reflect the emotional subtext of the character narrative. The director also gets involved in the sound mix and musical make up of the film. Directors often brainstorm and use methods such as storyboards to plan as well as to illustrate concepts in a music video. It has also been very common for music artists to put their own influences in music videos. Ones that started this revolution include MC Hammer and Michael Jackson.

The rise of the music directors started in December 1992, when MTV (Music Television) began to list the directors of the music video being shown along with the artist and the song credits - giving them much more exposure. Famous directors such as Spike Jonze, Stephane Sednaoui and Hype Williams all got their big break around this time as they produced unique styles and creative interpretations to tracks. Alot of music video directors actually went on in this time to direct feature films. This was seen with earlier directors such as David Fincher. 

Mark Romanek directed iconic videos in 1995, two of which were the most expensive expensive of all time - Michael and Janet Jackson's "Scream" and Madonna's "Bedtime Story". During the 90s MTV launched music channels around the world to show music's promotional videos suggesting reasons for the rise of the directors. 'MTV2' showed older and alternative videos thus giving credit to directors for their past work.