Ed Lovelace

Today we were visited by the media practitioner, Ed Lovelace. Known for his music video direction and recently his work on the partially fictitious documentary about a musician in America who ran away from home at the age of fourteen and has been touring for the last sixteen years.

Lovelace attended Long Road from the years 2000 - 2002. Whilst he was here he made a film opening sequence called 'Connection'. He filmed this in 2001 along with a music video for the song Sweeping Swords.

At Long Road he said that back then the only editing software they had was iMovie. This was when the iMacs first were released and therefore they had more basic software. He seemed amazed at the fact that we are currently using the Final Cut program to edit our material.

After Long Road Lovelace then moved on to go to Bournemouth university. He said one of the most positive things about Bournemouth was that some of the lecturers were real media practitioners with good experience of the industry. This made the learning experience much better for him.

Some work advice he gave the audience is that when you go into a project to have a clear and good idea on what you want to film. If you have this then it will always turn out more successful then if you don't.

After Bournemouth he worked as a runner for six different companies. He didn't see that this was helping him in any way and decided to leave. After this he began working for a record company called 'Creation'. During this time he started off working for free making highly low budget videos for about £100 each.

He made a video for the Gallows song 'Abandon Ship'. The video was made entirely of footage shot at one of the concerts. It wasn't all from the right song either. They just got all the best clips from the whole concert and put them into the video, using visual tricks to make it seem like it's lip-syched the right song. It won an MTV movie award which started his run of successful music video directing.

Now he is directing videos at £40 000 each.

He says that most of music video production is 90% writing and 10% actual production.

The set for his video of 'In One Ear' by 'Cage the Elephant' cost around £20 000 to build. It is my favourite music video of his as I like the concept, set and cinematography used in the video. It can be seen here: