Miami director's hustle hooks Lil Wayne, Pitbull - Quad Cities Online

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MIAMI (AP) - Long before his work earned millions of YouTube clicks, music video director David Rousseau would conjure mental images of the songs wafting into his region from the nearby Orange Bowl.Growing up in the eighties in Little Havana, Rousseau couldn't afford to see the big concerts happening blocks away, including Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd and Genesis.

But he was set on a way to his present-day career by imagining his own videos for the music spilling out of the stadium."I would literally sit on top of one of the cars in the neighborhood and listen. You're listening the music and you're trying to see out what's going on in there. That's where you begin visualizing the music," said Rousseau, whose parents are Cubans who affected to Miami from Venezuela.These days, the 35-year-old's imagination spawns bright colours and art that follow the medicine of artists including Lil Wayne, Enrique Iglesias, Pitbull, and T-Pain. Rousseau's innovative - and often thrifty - approach has earned him repeat business from Pit Bull, as good as Lil Wayne's label, Cash Money Records."He but live our swagger," said Cash Money CEO and rapper Bryan "Birdman" Williams.Rousseau's expertise in creating visuals that pop out of people's Web browsers has benefited him in late years, as the main venue for music videos has shifted from video to the Internet."When you're watching things on TV and you get a full shot and you see a vast vista, it's beautiful," Rousseau said. "But when you see it on your phone or on YouTube, people feel really tiny. Now you get to do more close-ups. You give to do more shots where the artist is full frame, centered in face of the screen."Still, Rousseau calls hours spent watching MTV his film school. As a child, he began making his own videos with his father's Super 8 camera and subsequently took TV production classes in high school. After graduating from South Florida's Barry University with a communications degree in 1999, Rousseau got a job in the promotions department at Miami's CBS affiliate, WFOR.Rousseau eventually landed at the satellite and digital cable carry The Underground Music Network. He was working there in 2006 when a friend recommended his directing skills to rapper Pitbull."He was hungry," Pitbull said. "He was like 'Look, I'll shoot this video for basically nothing. I only need to prove you how I work.' And surely enough, we did 'Be Restrained' in Little Haiti, and we haven't stopped working since then."Rousseau has made 13 videos with Pitbull, including "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)," which has received more than 150 million views on YouTube since its March 2009 release. A video Rousseau shot this class for the Iglesias and Pitbull collaboration "I Wish It" was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award.Building on his initial success with Pitbull, Rousseau started the production company CreativeSeen in 2008. The party offered a cheaper option to its larger competitors, which appealed to music labels stung by the recession."We took advantage of the economic situation," Rousseau said. "Normally, a production company would go down a job because they really couldn't do a profit out of it, but we could. And yet if we broke even, we were starting to get new clients."The years of big acts routinely shelling out a millon dollars for music videos are over, Rousseau said. Video budgets can even get into the six figures, but many are shooting for less. Taking those lower-budget projects while holding the character in place helped Rousseau quickly make a strong reputation."I know his work ethic," Pitbull said. "I know the fact that he's a soul who wants to get it done no matter what. He isn't afraid to hustle. He isn't afraid to grind."Pitbull's most recent video, "Hey Baby," was one of five videos Rousseau shot in October over a four-day period. But that schedule was relatively easily compared to the 12 videos he shot over two weekends earlier this class for Cash Money.Birdman praised Rousseau for having a clear mind of what they needed, and for acquiring the job done in a light measure of time. Looming over the work was the fact that Lil Wayne was just weeks off from starting a jail time in New York for a weapons charge."It was intense for everyone," Rousseau said. "You recognize how people say deadlines like 'What's a deadline?' Well, going to prison, that's a firm deadline."The thought was to stockpile videos that would keep Lil Wayne in the public eye while he was jailed, including May's "Get A Spirit" and September's "I Am Not a Human Being." Lil Wayne was released from jail in November.Cash Money's Kevin Rudolf said he trusted Rousseau right away, which was important since the rocker's "I Made It" video was shot only in presence of a green screen."You never know when you're the artist and you're playing in presence of a green screen what it's really going to feel like," Rudolf said.British singer-songwriter Jay Sean was impressed by how Rousseau ran the set while filming the picture for "Like This, Like That.""David's style was interesting because he didn't want to yell; he didn't want to yell at anybody," Sean said." I believe he knew what he cherished to capture, and he kept his eye on the goal. It made the all day pretty prosperous to film."Rousseau's production company has parlayed its music-video success into commercial work, and Rousseau said he's not ruling out the theory of television or movies."I enjoy doing music videos," Rousseau said. "We make other things that we're developing, but there's no rush."On the Net: CreativeSeen: www.creativeseen.com