Director Study - Richard Ayoade

Director Study - Richard Ayoade

Richard Ayoade is the director of one of my three choices - Fluorescent Adolescent. I have decided to do a study on him, based on this.

Richard was born in London England, to a Nigerian father and a Norwegian mother. They later moved to Ipswich, where Ayoade's career began. 

Ayoade is more known for his work in television, where he has played several different roles. He has also done quite a bit of film work as well. Recently his name is getting more and more 'out there', due to his major role in the hit series 'IT Crowd'. He won awards for this role, and since then, has began appearing in bigger programs.

Ayoade has done quite a bit of work with Arctic Monkeys recently, directing three music videos with them, and directing their DVD "At The Apollo" which won an award for 'Best DVD' at the NME awards. As well as this, he has worked with 'Super Furry Animals', 'The Last Shadow Puppets', 'Vampire Weekends' and quite a few more. 

After doing a bit of deeper research into his work, it turns out that I am not really a huge fan of his work. I think it is a little bit boring and its just something that doesn't really interest me. Maybe this is a hint to do something fun and exciting? I have found an example of his work; some he done with 'The Last Shadow Puppets' called 'Standing Next To Me'. The video is below:

This video is all performance based, with the one turn around to the dancers and the film crew. This is quite odd for a song of this genre. Usually in the indie based genre, we see a mixture of narrative/concept with performance filming going inbetween it, but this is solid performance. This shows that Ayoade is a director who likes to challenge Codes & Conventions (which is also backed up by the fact that the others I watched were similar) which is not a problem at all; however, I have struggled to connect with the majority of his work. I like Fluorescent Adolescent, but I think that's just because I think the video is cool, as opposed to having real aesthetic appreciation for the quality of the work, because really, its not that good!

After doing a quite thorough bit of research into Ayoade's work, what I can learn from it is it's okay to challenge your genre's codes and conventions, as long as it doesn't lose that relationship between the video and audience. You have to take your target audience into account if you are going to challenge conventions - because if they don't like it, the video's in trouble!