Ruffmercy
Ruffmercy (Russ Murphy) is a British music video director. He is well-known in the music industry for his distinctive illustrations and graphics in videos. He works with all types of artists, from heavy hip hop artists like ScHoolboy Q and Danny Brown, to pop and electronic music artists like Lily Allen and Disclosure. He even created Disclosure's trademark image of the drawn face that was featured on the cover of their popular album 'Settle'.
Whereas some music video directors like to focus on the narratives of the video, Russ Murphy has a signature video style. No matter what the message or genre of the song is, he includes his familiar sketch-like drawings in each video which are eye-catching and in some videos they are slightly hypnotic and haunting.
One example of a haunting and hypnotic video is Lily Allen's "Sheezus". The way that he colours the whites of her eyes, and flashes all kinds of patterns and dark colours behind her makes the video seem disjointed and jumbled. Even though the video is slightly creepy, I really like it because it's never boring. There's always something on the screen that keeps you fixated and I think usually that would be hard to do in a music video with only one location and only four different costumes. The drawings really help to enhance the tenacious/fiery diva persona she is displaying.
In Disclosure's video for 'F For You', Ruffmercy uses the same kinds of drawings like the halo around the artist and outlines of their body, but it has a different effect. Disclosure has a more electronic dance sound than Lily Allen, so Ruffmercy's illustrations have a strobe light kind of effect that makes people want to dance. He includes a lot of flashes of white backgrounds on the beat, which also feels steady to expose the beat. Also none of the illustrations connote something dark and creepy, like in Sheezus he draws a few crucifixes and horns on her head. In this he mostly just outlines their bodies while they dance or draw a simplistic version of them while they dance to accentuate their movements.
The way I came across Ruffmercy in the first place is from MNEK's "Wrote A Song About You". As well as loving the song, I thought the mix of normal time and slowed down clips used was interesting and wanted to see if the director used this as a motif in all of their videos. After researching a bit more about him I found that he had worked on many music videos that I'd seen before. I like the colours he used in this one, and the bold strokes that contrast with the thin squiggly lines. The waves and straight lines together match the song with its steady beat and changing melody.
