MARK ROMANEK

1. MARK ROMANEK

2. WHO IS MARK ROMANEK? • Mark Romanek was born September, 1859, in Chicago, Illinois.He is an award winning director who works with various diverse artists. • Romanek aspired to • become a feature • filmmaker from the time • he first saw 2001 at the • age of 9.

3. STUDYING • He studied at New Tier East, which was a progressive public school. • He studied a four year film production and theory course. Here he studied under a local filmmaker, Kevin Dole, who was already in the process of making a form of music video in the mid 1970’s. • This effectively made Romanek attend Ithaca College in NewYork, where he graduad and got a degree in cinema and photography, from Roy H.Park School of Communications.

4. First film, First job. • He directed and released his first film, Static.(September 1986) • When mark Romanek came to London to do publicity for his first film, static. The film received a cult fan base in London. He got the chance to meet several of the musicians whose music had been featured in the cult hit. • One of the artists involved in the sound track for Static, Matt Johnson of the the, asked him to do a music video and this prompting set Romanek in a whole new direction. This is where he got his first opportunity in music video directing, this was one of his first jobs.

5. PROPOGRANDA FILMS Romanek’s music video career began after a couple years of scriptwriting. He signed on with Satellite Films, a division from David Fincher Propaganda films. He has worked with many top-selling recording artists that have been given high appraisal from the videos produced. One of his most earliest was the Nine Inch nails song “closer". This attracted a lot of attention mostly controversial, as it acclaimed high criticisms of being disturbing, demonic and demented, but with this they are the same reasons why the video was so popular. He worked again with Nine Inch Nails to direct the video for the song ‘The Perfect Drug’.

6. MUSIC VIDEO or FEATURE FILMS..??? • Though Romanek really wanted to make feature films, he decided to continue making videos to generate a body of work and to gain experience. • “i also realised that i needed some time to become a person who had something worth saying in a movie. so my experience making music videos became sort of an elite film school and a place to develop a voice and technical craft.”

7. MUSIC VIDEO IT IS! Romanekﾕs music videos met great success and Romanek soon found himself on a 10-year tangent from his dream of becoming a feature filmmaker. this tangent also just happened to coincide with the real explosion of MTV in the early and mid-90s. He brings artistic and cinematic sensibility to his music videos. “when working on music videos, romanek always writes the concept himself. but that's the joy of it ﾑ that i can come up with my own idea, and i collaborate with some people that I've been working with, in some cases, for over a decade he says. so its really easygoing and i can get something out of my head right onto the screen pretty much just as i imagine it.” “i remember enjoying it and feeling like i had a knack for it. and i liked the fact that you could kind of do anything really and weren’t burdened by a narrative or dialogue. it was just sort of a new medium of pure poetic filmmaking,” says romanek.

8. COMMERCIALS

9. One hour photo

10. GRAMMY’S & AWARDS • Romanek received his first Grammy award for Best Short Video, for the video of Michael Jackson’s ‘Scream’ featuring sister Janet Jackson in 1996. • In 1997, Romanek became the first filmmaker to receive the VMA Video Vanguard Award and his work has been displayed and made part of the permanent collection of the Mueum of Modern art in New York , two videos were a part of this collection, ‘Closer’ by Nine Inch Nails and Bedtime story’ by Madonna. • He received his second Grammy in 1998 for Janet Jackson’s video ‘Got til it’s gone’. • He has directed 2 music videos for Madonna, ‘Bedtime Story’ : two VMA awards, for Best Direction of art and Best cinematoraphy. • Twenty mtv awards,three Grammys, a country music association award three billboard awards.

11. QUOTES • “He was a willing victim.” • “What is this song about?” • "Like this quote I dislike this quote.You can have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down.Most videos are about creating eye candy, a pretty image that can be a marketing tool. We just tried to show the simple truth of what's going on in his life. It's kind of a sucker punch when you see it the first time because we're not used to that emotional depth in music videos. • “Taxi Driver.” • “I thought about him in Seize the Day and his cameo in Dead Again , so it wasn't a leap to see him as a guy who's damaged goods. I think he connected to that guy. I think when someone has the talent Robin has, it makes you a bit of an outsider.”

12. EXPERIENCES • from concept to screen • when working on music videos, romanek always writes the concept himself. but thatﾕs the joy of it that i can come up with my own idea, and i collaborate with some people that I’ve been working with, in some cases, for over a decade,he says. “so itﾕs really easygoing and i can get something out of my head right onto the screen pretty much just as i imagine it.” • “but it was very fortuitous and mind-expanding to be exposed to that stuff at such an impressionable ageﾉ to actually see a Stan Brakhage film and get it, have it talk to you and really understand why itﾕs amazing, while all your friends are just going to the theater to see ﾔjaws, he says.but at the same time, you could go see jaws and think itﾕs great, too. you got this sense of the spectrum of what cinema could be. it could be commercial or it could be pure art. it could be anything really,ﾓ he says. and i think that really informed my video making and, hopefully, my filmmaking, where there’s this sense that there really are no rules.” • http://www.markromanek.com/faq.html

13. OASIS • this only made director mark romanek's job a whole lot more difficult. tapped to helm the video for "speed of sound", the first single from x&y, his mission was to make a beautiful, stately, emotional video for a band that didn't really need a beautiful, stately or emotional video. or a video at all, for that matter. • "i really didn't see a way to convey the subtle theme of the song with conceptual imagery, so i decided to just let the lyrics speak for themselves. instead, i tried — using light and color — to create a visual analog to the band's soaring, ecstatic sound," he says. "since the entire video was to be comprised of shots of the band performing, i felt like a little mystery should be created, so that you don't see everything all at once too early.” http://www.markromanek.com/press/mtvi.html