Director Case Study: Emil Nava

Emil Nava is a British director who works with lots of well known artists including:

• Jessie J
• Rita Ora
• Paloma Faith 
• Ed Sheeran
• Katy B
• Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding

He is in the UK urban pop industry for music video directing. Since making it into the industry, he has also come to direct adverts too, such as the L'Oreal adverts with Cheryl Cole promoting for the company, and the vitamin water advert featuring Jessie J. He has had a great success with Jessie J; her video for Price Tag received over 180 million views on YouTube and was the #1 viewed video in the UK. Emil Nava also won best video for Jessie J 'Do It Like A Dude' at the 2011 Q Awards. When asked why he loves making music videos as opposed to feature films currently, he said: 

"I think it’s just having such an open playing field to work with. When Ed Sheeran comes along with a song simply about love, it’s such a wide canvas try and make your video. So you really get to express really strong narrative on some, conceptual ideas on others or simply just a really strong, cinematic look. You get to express many different areas of your creativity and get to show it off a lot"  

His music videos are mostly narrative based and they have an edgy, fast cutting style which grabs audience attention. Although he enerally sticks to the genre of pop, this can be at any end of the scale; from Ellie Goulding's raw, edgy sound to Tinchy Stryder's street rap style, so he has to adapt the conventions of these sub-enres. 

In my opinion, they are all quite predictable videos in that they are what you expect to see when you hear the song, which obviously shows he is meeting the genre conventions successfully. 

Here are some examples of videos he has directed: