Francis Lawrence
Francis Lawrence is a music video and film director born on the 26th of March 1971 in Vienna, Austria. His most famous directed films are I am Legend and the Hunger Games. He has been a music video directed since 1993, where he initially joined an ex classmate in directing videos. He shot his first music video for Michael Blakely, president of atco records with the band Tidal Force. He has directed music videos for Aerosmith, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga, as well as many others. He has generally directed for pop and R&B artists, that are the most popular in the music industry. This means there is quite a lot of expectation for his videos as it is shown to a large audience, but the videos will also need to be unique to the artist and directing it may be a difficult challenge. For example, he has directed for Lady Gaga, and as an artist she is very unique and expresses this in her videos, so as a director, Francis Lawrence will need to ensure he portrays this when he directs videos. He tends to have a style of a computer generated look in his videos, and he uses a lot of extreme close ups.
For the video he directed of Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me A River", there is use of some features from Goodwin's theory, such as the demands for the record label and reference to the notion of looking. Throughout the video there are several close ups of the main artist, and it visibly makes him seen as the main point of focus in the video. There is also reference to the notion of looking, as the main artist is viewed through a video camera in the music video. These forms of techniques tend to be more common in pop music, as their is a higher demand from the industry towards the artist, so the video is primarily focused on them.
Another video directed by Francis Lawrence, was Avril Lavigne's " Sk8er Boi" which was a very successful video too. Despite being different to Justin Timberlake's video, it still come under a pop/punk rock genre, and follows aspects of Goodwins theory furthermore. As well as various close.
-Tommy
