Research - Passion Pictures

Today our class had the opportunity to meet Ollie Allgrove who works as an executive producer at Passion Pictures. Passion Pictures is an independent production company established in 1987 with studios in London, Melbourne, Paris, and New York. The studio specializes commercial and animation output and has works with companies such as cartoon network and with music bands such as the Gorillaz. Our guest discussed with us how music video are created within his firm and what are the different jobs and relationships present throughout this process. Additionally Ollie described the jobs and responsibilities of the people engaged within a project.

Ollie began by speaking about the meaning of talent management within the context of creating a music video. The idea behind talent management is the production teams capability to cooperate with the director, actors, musicians, operators, VFX artists and all other individuals within a given project. Successful team management allows for the effective and well-managed creation of a project. One aspect of team management is the representation of a director. Successful team management will lead to the desired representation of a director. In other words a director will be promoted while at the same time being comfortable with the project that he is working on with his team. The director has a lot of responsibility on set as he is in charge of guiding entire team of individuals throughout the process of realizing the project visualization. In other words the director must at the same time be able to be creative/visual while also leading and managing groups of people and the shooting schedule. Another aspect of team management is production. A producer manages the budget, time and schedule, as well as the relations between different clients, companies, studios and such. As our groups idea relies heavily on management of time, equipment, and actors/performers we all take care of this factors as producers within our music video. Furthermore because we are all involved within the creative aspect of our music video our entire group also acts as the directors for the project.

A major factor of producing a music video at Passion Pictures is the accurate representation of a brief and treatment. The purpose of the brief is to describe the concept for a project and then elaborate upon its artist’s background, the intended audience and the mood/nature of the project. After a brief is accepted a treatment is created to represent the overall outline of the project. Similarly to Polygraph Records, a treatment received at Passion Pictures is expected to be a mix of images and text that allow everybody that is to work on the project to visualize clearly what it is being planned to be and what are some of the aspects that potentially require being changed. In other words it is a visual representation that allows others to grasp a better understanding of what their project is and provide feedback if necessary.

By listening to Ollie I was able to grasp a better understanding of what preparations must be made for my groups project to be successful during the shoot and during post production. Our team has agreed that within the next couple of days we will create a storyboard, shot list, and final outline of our project to be well prepared for our shoot. I believe we might even possibly discuss what are our best shooting possibilities to allow the shoot to be efficient and satisfactory. In general I think that our groups project will benefit greatly due to the talk provided to us by the executive producer from Passion Pictures.