Jonas Akerlund Quotes

I need to know who the audience are in any particular play. It's no good forgetting that they're there.

But you can't really know your audiences so well.

I think HBO seems to have an extraordinary clever knack of catching the pulse of its audience. It really, really knows its audience.

A lot of rappers been putting out a lot of sub-par visuals. I feel like the visuals could be better.

Maybe there are people who are gamers who haven't seen movies I have made, or the movies I have made have made no impression on them at all.

You've got to keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience is thinking, and know what they'll accept from you.

I have a music-video background, and I feel like the responsibility of a music-video director is to do something that hasn't been done before in a really cool visual way. So much innovation has come in filmmaking through music videos.

I have a particular taste, I do films according to it and promote it accordingly.

The most difficult thing about music videos is that a lot of young filmmakers come into the medium, and they have so many different ideas, but they need to understand what the musician wants.

I love directing my music videos and writing video treatments, and I think it's all just because I love the visual aspect of it as well.

I started studying filmmakers, and I would say early on the ones that really inspired me the most were like the field magicians of music videos.

Directing music videos is all about capturing images.

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

Most of music videos were short films - they had dialogue, action sequences. I shot with cranes and helicopters. I wanted to created cinema-like moments.

Emotionally, light very much influences, I feel, the audience. It's not something that most audience members are conscious of, which is a good thing, because it means as filmmakers, we have the opportunity to gently control an audience into feeling a certain way.

The living experience of film only happens when a film is seen, and only within the spectator, because they project their own fears, desires, and fantasies upon those lights and shadows.

I began my career as a recording artist, and eventually I started directing my own music videos.

Regularly in music videos, I'll write the pitch and convince the artists that this is a good idea, and then I'm having to make concessions to meet in the middle.

It's not like we set out to antagonize the audience in any way. We're just presenting our music; it's really much more innocent.

One of the things I've learned is you can't really control what an audience is going to feel.

Before we start anything creatively, we have a firm understanding of our objective and our frame of mind for the campaign. Who's our audience, and what's their day-to-day behavior? How can we complement those behaviors? How is our message more than an interruption? Why would people care about what we're saying?

I've always written the storyboards for the music videos, and it's been hard working with directors trying to get them to understand what I'm thinking.

We actually make all of our own music videos. Often we come up with the visual concepts at the same time as writing the music.

Really study what types of formats have been working online that you resonate with: get a feel for what works in the current ecosystem of online video. Sometimes, that passion-project you really want to do is not the way to start.

Personally, as a filmmaker, I think you should prepare your audience as to what they can expect.