Talk with music videos producer Phil Tidy

Phil Tidy produced more than 100 music videos and commercials and came to our school to share his experience with us. He co-curate and produce BUG. BUG is operating since 2007 as an ongoing series of bi-monthly events at the BFI Southbank in London – the home of British cinema – celebrating global creativity in the music video. It showed 800 music videos on the big screen at the BFI from over 500 music video directors.

Phil Tidy also owns a production company Squire. Squire produces commercials, music videos and documentaries. Phil Tidy gave us an inside view of the work of the production company like legal entity, contracts and how artists and producers communicate between each other.

After giving us an understanding of his work, Phil Tidy shared with us other information about music video industry. This industry worth £4 billions to the UK every year according to a recent report by UK MUSIC and there are over 150k people in this industry which give the picture of how huge is it. Music videos are one of the ways to promote music. They are part of marketing promotional material in a campaign around the release of new music. Music videos were primarily made to help promote and sell records and were essentially born in the early 80's with the inception of MTV. However, with 31% of all music now consumed on Youtube, the landscape has changed.

To help with the production of music videos now and in the future, Phil Tidy gave us a set of questions that we have to think about to produce a good piece of work:

• Can the production be made for the available money
• How are we going to pitch the idea
• Are there resources to pay off the people from production team
• How to promote the product
• Who is going to take us seriously

And the last advice that we received from Phil Tidy was that big ideas are great but learning comes from the little things.