Director's Study-Tony Petrossian

Tony Petrossian is an Iranian born director who predominantly specialises in music videos and commercials. He has directed commercials across the world for companies including McDonalds, Nike, Sony Ericsson, subway and Zoo York. In terms of music video he has worked with a variety of artists such as Newton Faulkner, Slipknot, Avenged sevenfold, Orson and Slayer. He is currently signed the Los Angeles based production company RockHard Films which also includes directors such as: Marc Klasfeld, Ray Kay and Steve Jocz.



His visual style is generally fairly clean cut and naturalistic however he does use a great deal of unobvious visual techniques to play around with time and space in his videos. One example would be the video for Stone Sour’s song “through Glass” where people inside a Hollywood mansion suddenly appear to be cardboard cut-outs of themselves who are eventually taken away by a casually dressed almost “stage crew” looking man in black. The video eventually culminates in the whole location being dissembled.



To produce the effect of live people in the image suddenly becoming cardboard must have taken a lot of planning and work during the production. Another video of his which uses similar ideas is the video for Newton Faulker’s “If This Is It”, this includes many images of a static world which the camera tracks and pans around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoOD7bPIZM0&ob=av2e (Embedding disabled)



Many of the visual tricks employed correlate very well with the meaning of the song being portrayed; relationship between music and visuals being 1 of Goodwin’s 6. Another good example is Seether’s video for the song “Breakdown”. This consists of the sings head actually being broken down into separate images in a Rubix cube like fashion which is then manipulated in various ways, for instance at one point each face of the cube has the head of each band member.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E65UAV66y6E (Embedding Disabled)



An additional characteristic of is videos is to use a handheld camera effect for the majority of shots, this is often subtle for example in Newton Faulkner’s If this is it, however it does show that he favours a very hands on style for filming, which gives his often “unrealistic” videos a sense of realism.

His adverts also make use of techniques to manipulate time and space for example slow motion is used in his advert for McDonalds Real fruit Smooties as well as the Sony Ericsson “Hopper invasion” advert. Both of these the use of many different well defined colours which makes the ads stand out more. The idea of a colour scheme can also be seen in his “Beijing Ballers” Nike ad and “spread The Word” Zoo York ad.

These can be viewed at http://www.rhfilms.com/tony-petrossian/work/

As well as using slow motion in his videos he had also made use of time lapse based imaging, one particularly potent example of this is the video for Vermillion Part 1 by Slipknot. In the video a woman in a white dress is seen walking through a city as everything else speeds past her.




Overall Tony Petrossian appears to be a director who creates the meaning in his work through effectively combining inventive techniques used during pre-production and post-production, a further video to emphasize this style is Taking Back Sunday’s Liar(It takes One To know One) which includes the whole band playing on the paper on a lie detector

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pj0hFPYa9U&ob=av2n (Embedding disabled)