Music Video Director

PR Brown

PR Brown is a photographer, director and graphic designer and has directed many music videos covering many genres, but mainly rock. His recent work includes Murderdolls' "My Dark Place Alone" and Stone Sour's "Say You'll Haunt Me". His style is extremely individualistic and arty incoporating the use of graphics in his work. A lot of it is underground videos only featuring on very specific music channels but he has also done more commercial work such as the latest Bond Theme for Jack White and Alicia Keys in which he used the iconic Bond image to advertise the film and then manipulating it for his own use.



A common technique he uses is green screens:

Jack White and Alicia Keys
Murderdolls

Prince

Audioslave

These are all completely green screen without the use of any other setting. However, another one of my favourite techniques he has used was in Stone Sour's "Say You'll Haunt Me". There is a running narrative in the video which follows the theme of the song. In one section he places the various band members standing around in black suits, guarding the vocalist who is forced to sit in a chair. Over them is projected the band members playing their instruments in grainy flickering film.



His style of dark settings, graphics and green screen is very unique in music videos.

There is some deviation from this norm in videos such as John Mayer's "Half My Heart" which follows a strong narrative with no special effects and Slipknot's "Sulfur" which is mainly the band playing with some artistic camera shots. However, they still follow a fairly dark theme with the music and masks of Slipknot themselves creating an atmosphere whereas "Half My Heart" is set in a dingy bar and a church with dull colours and a generally grey colour scheme including the singer's skin which is very pallid and white.



Even the videos he has created using only the band playing live have his own unique talent incorporated. He mixes backstage footage and live footage to create a sense of the band and who they are which usually amounts to something fun and frisky, whether using effects in Motley Crue's "Sick Love Song" or just documenting the Sixx A.M: project with dates and places of their shows in "Tomorrow".