Robert Hales Director Study

I have chosen to conduct a directors study on British director and graphic designer Robert Hales. He began his creative career with the London-based design company Assorted Images, developing for a number of high-profile clients including The Royal Shakespeare Company, Sony and Levis Strauss. He has directed a range of gritty, darkly-toned music videos for a wide variety of artists, all under different genres but all popular in the music industry (mainstream), including Imagine Dragons, Gnarls Barkley (for which he won and MTV Video Music Award for directing the single 'Crazy'), Nine Inch Nails (he directed the video for their song 'Starf*ckers.Inc', and designed the cover for the CD single of 'The Day The Earth Went Away'), Miley Cyrus and Muse. His videos are performance based but with conceptual elements, such as featuring the artists wearing odd clothes, showing them in surreal locations with strange creatures or contorted dancers. The video I have chosen to focus on for my analysis is the 2015 Muse video 'Dead Inside'.

The visual style of lighting in the the video is somewhat dark, possibly filmed in a warehouse space, with the use of light clothing, accompanied by a white flour substance over the floor and instruments which create a cloud when hit/walked over/kicked up.

There are several performance shots in the video, of each member of the band, with their costumes selected by Hales to match the location and theme running throughout the video.

The conceptual elements of the video consist of two people, a man and a woman, dancing together in a contorted fashion, twisting themselves around each other, during which the woman has blackout contact lenses, and at the end of the video the man gets them too.

The editing style cross-cuts between the narrative of the conceptual story and the artists performance, using quick edits. There are a range of close up, establishing and moving shots of both the dancers and the band, especially close ups of the instruments, showing the performance in full. I really like Hales work, as I enjoy the combination of conceptual and performance style, as well as the dark tone of the video.