Interview with Andy Morahan.
Andy Morahan who has directed 100s of music promos with artists from George Michael, Michael Jackson and JLS. He is a British commercial, film and one of the movers behind some of the biggest stars in music.
He did a masterclass at USW he shared his insight and anecdotes with the students. Through this interview Andy Morahan gave a general idea of his career life and how is it like to work with famous, legend artist. So, the first question he was asked how he got into the music rooms and movie directing.
He smiled followed by a sigh he replied, “I was at the right place at the right time, I was at my college in London St. Martin’s and I played various school bands it was an early day of music, MTV came to our college in the 80′s there were a lot of big directors around they wanted a music videos for their artist.
“I was like these students who were trying to get a job as a runner and I was hustling to do stuff, but in those days we did not have cheat equipment or YouTube. But I was lucky because there was some equipment in the college.”
For the first few years, Andy Morahan was doing small British videos, therefore, when you make two or three videos it becomes a share rote because music videos were needed it but nowadays 3,000 people trying to get one million. But just like anybody else Andy had his first big break with one of the big artist George Michael and describes what he is like to work with.
“I had a call from the British music manager Gordon Jazz Summers telling me that George Michael wants to remake his video called Making of Faith because he did not like his hair and that was my first lesson when someone is a big star hair and makeup are very important.
“George Michael was amazing to work with my respect, he was very involved and sometimes too involved for example, the ideas and edit.” He said.
He was one of those artists who got the power of MTV in terms of marketing in his career alongside with Michael Jackson and Madonna, that was the generation who understood the power of music videos and used MTV to expand their power visual career to their music careers.
In the 1999’s Andy Morahan become more known for making narrative videos as a promo with a story but he explains how much did this add to the genre.
He adds: “It is a weird one because I have known for doing stuff like that but I believe performance is an absolute key to music videos. I always tried to keep an element of performance because peoples first reaction is to know how they perform.
Promos have changed since the heydays of the 1990s and they are different from commercial but Andy Morahan does not agree with that.
He responded: “ I think the budgets are not the same for example, most of the companies do not spend a lot on music videos which means the emphasis now is on creativity, to be honest, I think that is a healthy place to be. The business does not sales many records and the whole landscape has changed with downloads and streaming.
In Andy Morahan big career live performance directing was a part of it, he directed Michael Jackson Give it to me live performance and from that event, he learned a lot of skills.
“live performance is a direct result of a work of the 15,56 artist in the world who inevitably tour and want to film a show. A multi-camera role is a completely different skill for me in videos because it is not about catching the performance on stage, it is much about catching the event.
“Michael Jackson live performance was incredible, he did not know about the blue lights coming out of the floor and if cannot capture that then I do not know what can you do.
Overall, Andy Morahan is a very remarkable character. He has achieved a lot of things and most of his work stands out It is likely that wherever he goes and anything he does, his career will be successful and bring honour to the British society.
