Ollie Allgrove

Meeting Ollie Allgrove 

On Friday, we were visited by an executive producer from a company called The Mill - http://www.themill.com/ The mill is a the world's largest post-production company headquartered in London. As a company they produce lots of different types of reels, for example, music videos, advertisements and lots more. The mill was awarded with an oscar for the set design in the movie Gladiator (2000).


What does he do within the company?

Ollie runs the production side and makes sure that they have everything for the finishing treatment - he's in charge of putting it altogether. He was being completely honest with us when he said that 'it is a competitive environment our there'.

Ollie explained to us that it is vital to feel the song or artist when they pitch you the song/idea, as ultimately you are deciding what is going to be featured in the music video or any other type of short film. He mentioned that by making a connection with the artist, it will allow you to have a better insight into their image and style. After making sure that you are along the right lines with the concept as the artist, you will have to balance the idea with an image. He said that 'Production is about efficiency, you are never wasting time on set'.

Advice to us 

- Length of the song is vital, as a song that is 5 min long would just keep on going on for too long and you might not have enough material to keep the music video going for that long. This is why we should keep it from 3-3.30min long.

- Don't be afraid to scrap ideas and start over, because in reality we get sent about 15 different treatments per song and we straight away scrap 12 of them.

Ollie's Work Examples

One example is an advertisement for SSE Energy, the monkey in it is completely made through CGI.

Ollie showed us a video that he worked on with The Chemical Brothers. What they wanted was a girl dancing in an open space and then turning into a graphically designed dancer. There was no real budget for this music video, it was one of the first computer graphically designed videos which took them around 6 months for post production.

Below is the making of the video: