Blog.NicholasPatten.com

Interview: Derek Pike

1. When did you know you wanted to direct videos?
In high school I used to make snowboard videos, and that was basically just editing footage to music, I also had a great digital media teacher by the name of Steve Sitz who taught me a lot! As far as getting into music videos it wasnt until about four years ago when I had a introductory class at NYU film school where my teacher, Darrell Wilson would show us some great music videos to get us inspired. After doing some research, I then learned that it was a key stepping stone in a lot of feature directors careers ie. Brett Ratner, David Fincher, and Spike Jonze among many others. After realizing this could be my path into features as well, I was focused on becoming a music video director.

2. What is your favorite video that you've directed so far?
Do you ask a mother to choose her favorite child? Haha. I get a lot of compliments on my video for The Kid Daytona and Bun B “Air Born”, but I cant pick one video as my favorite, I did have a lot of fun on my most recent video shoot for Warner Music Group’s artist Outasight for his single “Better Late than Never”. We basically threw a party on a rooftop in Brooklyn.

3. How do you prepare your treatments?
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Last year I had to take an internship for school so I picked a commercial/music video production company here in NYC. After weeks of fruit basket runs, and going to post offices to mail out other directors reels, I decided that none of this was benefiting me and I needed to take matters into my own hands. I got on one of the computers and searched for their directors treatments, found a few and emailed them to myself. When I got back to my dorm later that night I took a look at all of them and picked what I thought were the best attributes of each of them and eventually came up with the format I use today. As far as the process of writing them, I generally listen to the song on repeat all night before I go to bed and I just try to visualize the entire video, if something sticks I write it down. The next morning, if that idea still seems legit I will send it off to the label.

4. What's next that you'd like to accomplish?
There is so much. I don’t even feel like I accomplished anything yet, I've barely even scratched the surface of my to do list. In the very near future I definitely would like to direct bigger music videos with larger budgets, and with the artists that frequent TMZ you know like John Mayer, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, even Justin Bieber ha! I also want to start doing more commercial work, and video work overseas such as London or even Japan. I think a goal of mine this summer is to get some sort of representation in London, that would be great. I also would like to focus on my feature scriptwriting, in school I wrote a lot but now music videos are taking up most of the time I could dedicate to writing features.