Director Interview: Daniel Broadley (HTF Exclusive)

Daniel Broadley is a Devon based filmmaker who has rapidly accumulated a large and diverse portfolio over the last few years, working with bands and musicians such as Deaf Havana, Cosmo Jarvis, Portia Conn and more recently Don Broco. What sets Dan apart from other filmmakers is that he is still keen to work with smaller unsigned artists as well as more well known acts, compared to many directors who see unsigned acts as merely a starting point. We caught up with him to see what he has been up to lately.

HTF: Hi Dan! Thanks for talking with us. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do.

D: My name is Daniel Broadley and I direct music videos for a living. I currently reside in the southwest of England but frequently travel across the UK when working. I started making films when I was 13 years old, skate videos were my thing, and originally they were just as a way of documenting my friend’s progress and myself as we attempted to further ourselves in our sport. However it wasn’t long before I started enjoying the filming and editing side of skating more than I did the sport, which naturally pushed me to pursue it as a career. I went through all the usual channels, college and university and learned where my strengths and weaknesses were, through those I wound up making music videos which is very similar to cutting a skate video together, in the sense that it’s all audio and visual based with no dialogue.

HTF: We heard you recently directed a video for Don Broco, what was it like to work with such a well established band and did it differ significantly to music videos you have done in the past in any way?

D: I recently directed the video for ‘You Wanna Know’, which is the second time I have been fortunate enough to work with the band. They are an incredible bunch of guys to work with and a band that actually allow me to explore my ideas and create something much closer to my strengths in filmmaking. There is definitely a clear line between the type of shoot that took place for Don Broco than a lot of the unsigned artists that I work with, rather than a small crew of 2 or 3 it becomes an army of 20 – 30 crew members. Having things like a DOP and a 1st AD really make a difference on the day, it allows to sink into the role of a director, instead of micro managing myself as every crew member, which is usually what happens on the lower budget videos.

That is not to say I don’t enjoy working with smaller budgets, on the contrary, they are completely different to the bigger videos, in almost every way, despite the outcome as a format remaining the same (a three minute promo video that is used for marketing an artists song), the actual shooting process can often be a lot freer, where as a label will expect you to shoot to your treatment as closely as humanly possible, mainly because they have allocated a budget for you to spend on doing so, the second you diverge it can make them uneasy, as so much money has been placed in your care to create their promo video. On a micro-budget shoot you are often working in environments that you don’t have permission for and that you haven’t seen until the day itself, working with assumed lighting or often no lighting at all. So there are ample opportunities to work to a location’s strengths and adapt the video on the day to increase the quality of the outcome, the only people that need to ok it are usually the artist and occasionally a present manager, and since they are there with you it becomes an incredibly easy task to tweak the ideas as the shoot unfolds, something that a major would never allow you to do.

HTF: We understand you have recently been taken on by Kode Media as a director, how’s that going?

D: Working with Kode was originally a bit of a gamble for me, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, I was at the front of them making a decision to become a directors agency, I think I had become so comfortable in the lower and mid levels of the music video business that all of a sudden I was possibly out of my depth. However almost as soon as I joined I won a pitch for Don Broco, which at the time was my biggest video to date, through that project I became incredibly close to team, they are all such inspirational people to be around with a drive and mentality that out weighs many of the top dogs I’ve met over the years. It’s incredibly exciting to be involved with a company that are making so many waves, not only in the music video business but in the advertising and corporate worlds too.

HTF: You have built up an impressive list of clients, is there any music video project you particularly enjoyed working on?

D: I think some of my favourite projects were perhaps some of the original music videos I made, I guess at the time I was still learning, not everything was as formulated as it is now so every time I finished a project I would have learned something drastically different from the last. In more recent times the Deaf Havana video for ‘Little White Lies’ was a lot of fun to make, the band have an incredible sense of humour and the idea itself was extremely comedic which meant we spent a lot of the time in stitches from watching the scenes pan out.

HTF: What’s next for you, any big projects planned that you can talk about?

D: There’s nothing massive in the pipeline at the moment, although I am constantly pitching on new projects which all tend to unravel very quickly from receiving the brief to producing the promo. I am actually on the verge of starting a smaller video agency myself targeted at working with smaller unsigned artists. As a director I’m naturally looking to pursue productions with bigger budgets and new musical genres but there is a whole wealth of unsigned talent that have everything but the budget on their side, I started off in this business making videos for those very bands and I would hate to turn my back on them and not be able to provide them with a strong marketing tool that will allow them to progress their career in the music business. So I’m planning to bring on board young aspiring directors much like myself 3 years ago to create a collective of directors that can handle all different kinds of budgets, allowing unsigned artists to have a company they can rely on when dealing with low budget music videos.

HTF: We recently watched the feature film you directed with Cosmo Jarvis and thought it was great, any plans to make more feature length films or are you sticking with music videos for now?

D: There have been talks over the past few months about future involvements with feature films, At this stage it’s hard to say which will come to fruition but needless to say it was an incredible time of my life, straight out of university and onto a micro-budget feature. I definitely have Cosmo Jarvis to thank for a lot of my outlook on filmmaking, there is nothing that will stop him from getting a scene done, it doesn’t matter how illegal or impossible it may seem. Either way I will continue to make music videos and pursue that for the foreseeable future and if new opportunities present themselves I shall take them as they come.

HTF: Have you got any advice for aspiring filmmakers out there?

D: I guess as much I encourage creativity and adapting a unique style of work I would definitely suggest that filmmakers learn their market as thoroughly as possible, having fresh ideas is great but executing them in a way that clients and public alike will enjoy is crucial. I still don’t feel like I have adapted my style to a place that I am 100% happy with, but I have been experimenting with so many different styles as the years have gone on that I feel like I can now make a video to suit any genre of music, often by tailoring various techniques together. Look at the videos that are popular at the moment, and without copying them look at why they might be popular, what is it about them that has that appeal that the majors seem to want.

For some of Dans work visit either his Kode page  or his Vimeo.