In Conversation: Reza Dolatabadi

We were lucky enough to pick the brains of British-Iranian and London-based director, Reza Dolatabadi after both releases of Bastille’s music videos for “WHAT YOU GONNA DO???” and “survivin’” — both projects had a truly diverse team behind it’s creation and with Reza managing and overseeing the entire creative process, we managed to chat about personal inspirations, cut ideas, finding the balance between both projects and the love Bastille’s fan-base has shown.

Hello! Introduce yourself - who are you and what do you do?

Hello! My name is Reza Dolatabadi. I’m a British Iranian director, producer and passionate photographer based in London.

Out of your entire career, which project has been the most fun to work on and why?

Except one or two, most of my projects have been a lot of fun for me to work on. I think everything I made this year, including the animation for Lionel Richie’s show has been on the very top of the fun list.

Your most recent projects were Bastille's latest two single releases. Could you let us know about the creative process you and the team went through to create the finished piece?

I had different challenges from the team. I think the hardest challenge for me was to manage and direct both videos almost at the same time. They both had a very different look and process but we had almost the same team working on both. We were also racing against very tight deadlines.  I think trying to solve problems and find shortcuts to deliver the film was the hardest thing, and the most rewarding part both for me and everyone on the team. 

On WHAT YOU GONNA DO???, the hardest thing was to constantly come up with ideas and different looks while keeping everything under the same design umbrella, to make sure every scene flows to the next, smoothly. I guess my biggest goal and challenge was to make both videos enhance the sound of their tracks, almost making them sound louder. The biggest challenge for our animation team was lip-synching, one of the toughest parts of animation. The hardest shot was when you see the band’s head on the pyramid, singing and rotating while we are looking at them from a low angle. That really killed our animators to make.

For survivin’ I think it was the overall look and creating some of the visual effects and the reflections that can be seen throughout the video.

I believe you said it took 7 weeks on your Instagram account to complete the  first video, did you ever have any worries about finishing it within what would've been a close deadline? 

Yes, and I was also working on the second video ‘Survivin’ too.  You always have to make compromises on every project, constantly making shortcuts just to make sure you deliver within the time and budget. My biggest worry was having to do too much of those shortcuts and compromise on the quality. We did end up making a lot, but hopefully they are not visible to the audience.

What were your inspirations for the videos? Did you refer to previous work you've done or anything within popular culture right now? 

I’d say the first inspiration almost always comes from the track and the themes of the song. For “WYGD???" I referred to some of the sketches and experiments that I’ve done in the past. Also my first ever animated film Khoda, plus some of the arts that I like and always wanted to use within a project. 

For Survivin’,  I wrote a script with my friend Alex and supplied that with a series of moodboards of paintings by Edward Hopper and works from my favourite street photographers such as Ernst Haas, Alex Webb, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Joel Meyerowitz, as well as some of my own shots. I was actually really excited to introduce my passion for photography into an animated film for the first time. It was always a very separate hobby for me until this video.

"WHAT YOU GONNA DO???” and video itself, gives off a dystopian, eccentric and in-your-face tone, was that originally planned? 

That’s a question for Dan Smith and the band I guess, but I knew the themes they wanted to touch on, without being preachy about it. So I set off to make something just suggestive enough for the audience to fill the gaps for themselves. To me, the track has a bit of a punk sound to it too, so I used that as an opportunity to inspire the art direction of the video.

As the director, did you have any other ideas that maybe didn't go any further for whatever reason?

Yes for ‘survivin'' I had two other ideas, one was veeery nuts and trippy and the second one was extremely grim, based on a tragedy that happened to a friend earlier this year. Both of them got rejected and looking back, it was for a good reason too. I think I might use the trippy idea somewhere in the future.

Off the release of both videos, Bastille fans have been incredibly kind with their praise of you and your team's work; what would you like to say to them?

I wasn’t really familiar with Bastille’s fan base until the release of the first video. The amount of fan art that was created afterwards was insane, I even saw a couple of tattoos from the videos which dropped my jaw. I guess in the end the videos were made for them, so their response is the best reward both for the band and myself.

Finally, what's next for you?

I’m currently in Italy, trying to switch off as I didn’t have any breaks since the beginning of 2020. I’m developing a short animated film, hoping to start and possibly finish before the end of 2020.

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Image credits: Reza Dolatabadi & Bastille

Published: 25.10.20