METALSUCKS · 2013
“David Brodsky knows his shit.”
READ THE ARTICLEPERSON / MY GOOD EYE
DAVID
BRODSKY
DIRECTOR / CINEMATOGRAPHER
David S. Brodsky is a director, cinematographer, editor and founder of My Good Eye.
Before moving fully into filmmaking, Brodsky sang in several bands and worked as a Creative Director at an advertising agency. He eventually decided agency life was not where he wanted to stay and shifted his focus toward music videos and independent production.
He began his music-video career primarily as an editor, cutting roughly 100 music videos before moving behind the camera. From there, directing and cinematography became increasingly intertwined, eventually leading to the hands-on approach that defines much of his work: whenever practical, he shoots what he directs.
He founded My Good Eye in 2003 and, over the following two decades, directed, shot and edited more than 350 music videos, becoming particularly associated with rock and heavy music.
His work has ranged from tiny clubs, abandoned buildings and stripped-down performance shoots to large stages, live productions and commercial work. His filmmaking also overlaps with animation, motion graphics, visual effects, virtual production and interactive media. He is also a game designer and developer and a Bethesda Verified Creator.
My Good Eye's archive documents hundreds of those productions, with individual pages for artists, songs, years, labels and credits.
APPROACH
SEE THE
MUSIC
Brodsky describes music as something he can “see.” While shooting, he is reacting to the song physically as much as visually, letting its rhythm, dynamics and emotional temperature determine what the camera should be doing.
That does not automatically mean movement. If the song calls for calm, the image gets calm. If it explodes, the camera has permission to explode with it. The goal is not to make everything frenetic. It is to capture and enhance the energy already present in the song.
Brodsky has never been particularly interested in making play-throughs. A camera can record five people performing a song perfectly well by sitting there. A music video should do more than prove that happened.
A static shot of someone headbanging can become strangely ridiculous if it sits on screen after the visual energy has already expired. The camera, the performance, the cuts and the song all have rhythm. The job is to feel where those rhythms meet.
That instinct runs through the work: see the music, move with it, and know when not to move.
CAMERA LANGUAGE
FIND THE
MOVE
A recurring part of Brodsky's work is looking at a camera or support system and asking what else it can physically do.
The DVX100 and later HVX200 opened up possibilities simply because they were small enough to put in places larger cameras rarely went.
On Suicide Silence's “Bludgeoned,” Brodsky noticed that the drummer was using a clear snare head.
“Well, buddy, I'm gonna climb between your legs now. Don't get excited.”
He dropped onto the floor between the drummer's pedals, aimed the camera upward through the clear drum head and shot directly into his face while he windmilled and beat the kit into metaphorical pulp.
That is the useful part of smaller cameras: not that they are smaller, but that suddenly there is a shot where there wasn't one before.
The same thinking applied to the Advanta-Jib. Its mechanical pan/tilt head required no power and was perfectly capable of smooth, conventional jib movement. Brodsky also discovered that its light weight made much faster, more physical moves possible, including movement that could feel almost handheld at the end of the arm.
The jib went unnamed for more than a decade.
Then Tucker Rule walked onto the Frank Iero and the Future Violents “Great Party” set, looked at it for roughly four minutes and named it Jibby Hendrix.
The name stuck because it's awesome and Tucker is a clever fucker.
Jibby is still in the My Good Eye kit and still comes out when the music wants what it does.
STABILIZATION
STABLE
DOESN'T MEAN
STATIC
Modern gimbals created another set of behaviors to explore.
One is The Toss: Brodsky uses side-mounted handles to throw the entire Ronin forward and catch it. The sudden acceleration forces the motors to compensate, briefly disturbing the perfectly stabilized image before the system recovers.
Another is The Smack, which is exactly as sophisticated as the name implies. Hit the handles sharply and the gimbal reacts abruptly, then eases itself back toward normal operation.
Neither exists because Brodsky dislikes stabilization. They exist because sometimes perfect stabilization is the wrong rhythm.
And yes, this may have contributed to the death of an RS3.
It was a tool. Tools get used.
IN-CAMERA TECHNIQUE
THE
SHAGGY
The Shaggy began with a loose lens and a room that was kinda boring.
While shooting Anew Revolution's “Head Against The Wall” in 2010, a vintage lens came loose, fell to the ground and skittered across the floor. Brodsky picked it up and tried to reseat it while watching the monitor instead of the camera. The image bent, shifted, flared and snapped in and out of alignment.
His first useful thought was essentially: well, this looks cool, because this room is kinda boring.
Instead of fixing the “problem,” he recognized that the problem had visual value.
The move developed into physically separating the lens from the mount, manipulating the optical path by hand, then snapping the image back into alignment with the beat, lyric or performance.
It became The Shaggy and has remained part of Brodsky's camera vocabulary ever since.
He remembers Whitechapel's “The Darkest Day of Man” as the point where people outside the crew really began noticing it.
Years of doing it have never killed a sensor. Blood has historically been considerably harder on the cameras.
Sometimes art is recognizing that an accident is better than what you were trying to do.
BEFORE IT WAS COMMON
PUSH IT
FURTHER
Brodsky was pushing images toward the extremity of heavy music well before that became a common visual language for the genre.
Fast music could have fast cameras. Violent music could have violent cuts. Unstable music could distort. Huge moments could become visually huge. Quiet moments could sit still.
The point was never simply to make everything louder.
It was to stop treating the image as an observer.
Across hundreds of videos, the underlying idea has remained surprisingly consistent: the picture should feel like it belongs to this song, this performance and this artist.
When the job is to create something unique to an artist, interchangeability is failure.
If another band could be dropped into the same concept without materially changing it, something important was missed.
THE BAND FIRST
EARN THE
CREDIT
Brodsky has a simple test for music-video directors: if the director's name appears prominently at the beginning of the video, he usually stops watching.
A music video is not David Brodsky Presents.
It is the band's video.
The director's job is to understand the artist, understand the song, make something worthy of both and then get the hell out of the way.
If somebody reaches the end of the video, thinks “Who made that?” and goes looking for the answer, Brodsky figures he has earned the right to have his name there.
Not before.
The point is not to make every artist recognizable as his work. The point is to make every artist more recognizable as themselves.
SCION A/V / MUSIC(LESS) CONFERENCE
TEACHING THE
PROCESS
Brodsky spoke at two Scion Music(less) Conferences after the conference’s first year. Both appearances were filmed. One was publicly released by Scion A/V as a roughly forty-minute workshop about making music videos from the ground up; whether footage from the other appearance was ever released remains unconfirmed.
The surviving record preserves the released workshop’s original YouTube ID, c3lt0mxp6g0, although the upload’s current availability is unconfirmed. Metal Injection called the workshop exceptionally thorough and recommended it to anyone interested in music-video production. MetalSucks later described it as essentially a forty-minute masterclass.
OUTSIDE THE SITE
OTHER PEOPLE
SAID IT
This site can obviously say whatever it wants about Brodsky. More useful are the people who worked with him, covered the work, or had no particular reason to flatter him.
KING DIAMOND · 2023
“I was speechless! I had nothing to criticize.”
SOURCECANNIBAL CORPSE · PAUL MAZURKIEWICZ
The band has repeatedly described Brodsky as a director who understands what they are and turns the songs into the kind of brutal short films they want.
READ THE INTERVIEWSWASHBUCKLE · COMMODORE REDRUM
“He's remarkably good at what he does.”
READ THE INTERVIEWSELECTED ARCHIVE WORK
A FEW
ENTRIES
REPEAT RELATIONSHIPS
WORKED
TOGETHER
Counts below are credited archive entries, not a claim that every entry carries the same role.
Clutch18 credited archive entries / 2016–2022Whitechapel14 credited archive entries / 2008–2026Revocation13 credited archive entries / 2009–2025Rivers of Nihil12 credited archive entries / 2014–2025Cannibal Corpse7 credited archive entries / 2012–2023Entheos7 credited archive entries / 2022–2024Goatwhore7 credited archive entries / 2006–2022
CORE ROLES
WHAT HE
DOES
Primary identityDirector / Cinematographer
CompanyFounder, My Good Eye
Music video work350+ directed, shot and edited
Earlier careerCreative Director in advertising; music-video editor before moving behind the camera