Floria Sigismondi is a renowned surrealist music video director known for directing videos for major artists like The White Stripes, The Cure, Marilyn Manson, and Christina Aguilera. She introduces her unique surrealist style to all genres of music. Her videos have no live performances and feature strange elements like oddly colored fruit. She does not specialize in any particular genre and works with famous mainstream artists to reach large audiences. Her videos have no narrative but use jarring, disconnected visuals and a limited color range to create interesting, bold works that prove compelling videos need not focus on the singer or have a clear story.

1. Floria Sigismondi, music video director (Tasks 11-13)

2. Her official website: http://www.floriasigismondi.com/main.html Floria Sigismondi is a well known surrealist video director, most famous for directing videos for the White Stripes, The Cure, Marilyn Manson, Christina Aguilera, David Bowie, Muse and The Raconteurs. She also takes on other commercial jobs such as advertising; she made a short advertisement film I particularly like for MAC Cosmetics. Three music videos I particularly liked by her are 'Blue Orchid' by the White Stripes, 'End of the World' by The Cure and 'Fighter' by Christina Aguilera. I like it that she introduces her own surrealist style to videos for all genres of music. Because her style is quite jarring and strange you wouldn't expect to see it from an artist as popular as Christina Aguilera.

3. You can clearly see that all 3 videos are made by the same person because there are intertextual links. Something that features in all 3 videos is fruit, usually of a strange colour, particularly white.

4. Another thing I have noticed all her videos have in common is that there is no use of live performance, it is all mimed and lip synched. I think this is to give her complete creative control and means she can play around with the footage and edit it exactly as she wants it to be. It also creates a cleaner finish to the video than live footage, as all the artists look pristine. She doesn't appear to specialise in one particular genre, which I think is interesting and would be what I would do if I was a director, just so I didn't get bored working with the same kinds of people. I think her work is fairly mainstream, all of these videos were easily available on Youtube and have been shown on music channels such as TMF and MTV. She seems to work with fairly famous artists eg Christina Aguilera and Marilyn Manson. Even if you haven't nessecerily listened to any of their music you know who they are. I think this is because they have large fan bases so lots of people will watch the videos and therefore see her work, this gives her greater publicity to a certain extent. The editing is quite sharp and quick, there are little to no fade in or outs and you never get to see one shot or image for a long period of time, however certain elements reoccur throughout the video, such as the awkward ballerinas in the 'Fighter' video; they appear at 0:08, 0:31, 0:54, 1:20, 1:33 and so on. Her videos don't appear to have any narrative, but I think this is partly what makes them so interesting, because the visuals are so unconnected to the song and to each other, the only example I could really find in her work of a narrative was in the MAC cosmetics video, which appears to be based loosely on the idea of Alice in Wonderland.

5. I really like her work because it's so strange and disconnected from reality. For the most part she uses a very limited range of colours and I find this appealing because I think it's bold and different from a lot of music videos. I also like the way her work proves you don't have to have a comprehendible storyline or the singer in your face all the time for it to be interesting. I particularly liked the video she did for The Cure using stop motion. I think it looks really interesting and having already been interested in using stop motion on this project has really inspired me to explore it further. I may also attempt to imitate the kind of colour range she uses in her work in my own.