Dougal Wilson was born in Heswall, England. He studied physics at Durham university and went on to work at the Leith agency in Edinburgh. Here he worked as a copywriter and wrote many adverts for companies such as Irn-Bru and the beer brand Tennants. His advertising work won him countless awards. After attending numerous shoots for the commercials which he wrote, Dougal discovered that he really enjoyed the directing aspect of the shoots and this prompted him to begin creating low budget music videos for his friends bands. As well as these he also produced several short films and comedy skits. This portfolio of work caught the eye of London based production agencies Blink and Colonel Blimp and they signed him up. Dougal believes that the most important part of a music video, more important than the techniques and effects, is the core idea. He favours ideas that can be summed up succinctly, preferably in one sentence that will capture the imagination of those he is working with.

Dougal’s Background

Often Dougal tries to think of ideas that can be summed up very briefly. This is a discipline that was established when he worked at the Leith advertising agency. In his interview with the British Council he describes how he was required to go in each day, sit with his creative partner and think of ideas from nothing. He believes that this trained him well for thinking of lots of ideas for a project and also rejecting lots of ideas too. Dougal thinks that his prior knowledge of music helps him greatly when he is creating storyboards. The storyboards he does create are very detailed and often they have the musical notes and bars underneath the sketches to make the idea extremely clear.

Sketches from Dougal’s storyboard for the Bat For Lashes – What’s A Girl To Do music video. This video was nominated for the MTV Europe Awards.

Work Methods

This video was one of Dougal’s first professional music videos. It was low budget and it had to be shot on digibeta. It was actually a song by Mike Skinner from, already established band, The Streets. Mike didn’t want to appear in the video so they cast an actor as the singer. The premise for the video comes from anti-war marches. However, as the lyrics ‘what is the problem’ are repeated throughout and the song is essentially a rant at the singers girlfriend, Dougal decided that it would be an interesting idea to have an anti-girlfriend march. The initial idea was that the singer would march along the street with a sign reading ‘what is the problem’ and he would be joined along the way by other protesters until the end when there would be an enormous and chaotic crowd. Due to the lack of budget this wasn’t possible, but to overcome this Dougal attended an anti-war demonstration and gave the signs to people there. Therefore, in the foreground all the signs are relevant to the video but it looks like there are thousands of people all marching for his cause.

Graffiti What Is The Problem

This video was one the first videos that Dougal created which was seen on television as the song did well in the charts. Like his previous videos it was still fairly low budget so when planning it he tried to refrain from including too many locations or ambitious ideas. The idea to have girls with DIY tools came from a past discussion, when he was creating a pitch for a rock song, about sexy shopping channels. Dougal like the contrast between the feminine and masculine aspects of the concept. However, this idea seemed too complicated due to the low budget so to simplify it, it was decided that the video would become more abstract and they would use brightly coloured backgrounds.

Benny BenassiSatisfaction

Dougal’s idea for this music video primarily came from the sounds of the song rather than the meaning of it. He thought it had a choppy, awkward and mathematical sound to it. This reminded him of books that are typically found in museums that allow you to make your own characters out of paper. The idea developed as he researched these books on the internet or in museums and eventually he decided to create a paper band. He created obstacles for the band by considering what paper does. He established that it blows away, gets crumpled, burnt and cut by scissors. Therefore, all of these hazards are featured in the video. To make the band look realistic it was decided that they would actually go through the process of creating a band out of paper for real.

Klonhertz Three Girl Rhumba

The idea for this video is that the lead singer, Mike Skinner, gets his holiday photos back on a cold British winters day. As he is looking through the photographs they begin to sing. This means that while he is looking through the images he is seeing various scenarios from his holiday being acted out as he is singing. Dougal wanted the video to have a genuine cheap package holiday feel to it so it was decided that they should go on an actual holiday to Gran Canaria. However, they didn’t have much money so the majority of people involved in the video are friends of either Dougal or Mike. Dougal’s main fear was that it would end up looking set up and wooden rather than spontaneous so he tried to create a real holiday atmosphere as far as possible – this involved people getting drunk for real and generally entering into the true spirit of the scenarios. The video was shot on digibeta so the camera was able to keep rolling most of the time meaning that spontaneous moments were captured on film.

The StreetsFit But You Know It

The happy sound of this song combined with the name ‘Rascal’ reminded Dougal of old British comics. From this he decided that it would be an interesting idea to create a video with the feel of and old children’s television show, portraying the singer as a character from this. Inspiration for this thought came from shows such as Muffin the Mule, Andy Pandy and Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men. The concept of contrasting the innocence of a children’s television show with the harsh subject matter of the song – growing up in a rough area of London and trying to avoid trouble seemed like an interesting idea to Dougal.

Dizzee RascalDream

I particularly like the narrative elements to Dougal’s work – especially in the video for What Is The Problem by Graffiti and Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time by Jarvis Cocker. Stylistically I like these videos because they feature fairly ordinary settings and characters. Also, I like the way Dougal takes into consideration and manages to capture Jarvis’s quirky personality. As Dougal works primarily with artists who are less well known he is able to explore ideas and add humour to his videos that may not be suitable for a mainstream music video where there is less opportunity for the artist to take risks with their star persona. In his interview with Antenna UK he repeatedly mentions that for the majority of his videos he had a very low budget; this is something which I can relate to whilst I plan the creation of my own music video therefore I found it inspiring to see what can be achieved with a limited budget.

I particularly like the narrative elements to Dougal’s work – especially in the video for What Is The Problem by Graffiti and Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time by Jarvis Cocker. Stylistically I like these videos because they feature fairly ordinary settings and characters. Also, I like the way Dougal takes into consideration and manages to capture Jarvis’s quirky personality. As Dougal works primarily with artists who are less well known he is able to explore ideas and add humour to his videos that may not be suitable for a mainstream music video where there is less opportunity for the artist to take risks with their star persona. In his interview with Antenna UK he repeatedly mentions that for the majority of his videos he had a very low budget; this is something which I can relate to whilst I plan the creation of my own music video therefore I found it inspiring to see what can be achieved with a limited budget.