Task 3 - Music Video Director Research

Director - Michel Gondry


His work:

Michel Gondry is a French film, commercial and music video director and an Academy Award-winning screenwriter. He is well known for his inventive visual style of mise en scene.

His career:

His career as a director began with making music videos for the French rock band Oui Oui, in which he was also a drummer. The way in which he made the videos for Qui Qui caught the attention of music artist Björk, who asked him to direct the video for her song "Human Behavior". This continued with Gondry directing a total of seven music videos for Björk. Then he went onto directing music videos for a number of different artists including Daft Punk, Kylie Minogue, The White Stripes, The Chemical Brothers, The Vines, Steriogram, Radio head, and Beck.

His intended target audience:

Michel Gondry’s intended target audience is mostly between the age group of teenagers to adults because of the types of music videos that he directs. Another reason why these are his intended target audiences is because of the artists that he directs for because these age groups are the ones that listen to that type of music the most.

How he creates the music videos for this particular type of audience:

Michel Gondry used a range of different techniques to create his videos, one of the techniques that he used the most of stop animation, this was a very time consuming process because it is just taking pictures and putting them together, although this was a very simple way to making these videos, at the end when all of the images were put together it looked very effective. He used this technique when he directed some of the white stripes videos for example, the hardest button to button.

How the audiences respond to his work:

The audiences respond very well to his work for a lot of reasons, one of the reasons is because they find his videos very enjoyable to watch because of the different techniques that he uses. He uses a variety of different tecniques the one that he uses the most is stop motion animimation because is a very simple thing to do but it looks very effective after he uses this tecnique often when creating videos for the white stripes such as for the song "Fell in love with a girl", this was all done in stop animation with lego which was very enjoyable to watch. The videos get alot of positive feedback such as on youtube, here are a couple of examples:

CODman567874 (2 days ago)
just when i thought music couldn't get any cooler it turnes into legos.

michaelteter (2 days ago)
Crazy amount of work went into this lego video! I can't fathom it.
Great work

Another place where his work gets very good reviews is on amazon, such as on products about him like dvds. Here is a example:

By A Customer

Just watched this today and all I can say is that it's probably the most exciting dvd I've ever seen. This man has a fantastic knack of simply matching images to music. No other director exhibits such a real feel for the music - every video here totally matches the artist and the song. So many clever touches - you really have to watch some of these videos several times to 'get' all the ideas he puts into his work. In short, there is no other video director who is quite so innovative, creative, artistic and just plain damn brilliant as Michel Gondry. Buy! With 4 hours plus of footage you really can't go wrong with this. I'm thinking of buying a copy for all my friends as early Christmas presents!


Here are a couple of his videos:




This is the video for the white stripes the hardest button to button, the whole of this video was done using stop animation which was used to create all of the moving drumkits this video took a very long time to make but it turned out very exciting because the video was made with one of his best editing tecniques.



This is the video for Kylie Minogue come into my life, this was a very exciting video to watch because it consisted of kylie walking through the same place over and over again but each time that she passed the dry cleaners another kylie came out. This video got very good feedback and helped to promote the artist.