This is my favorite music video from a former student.

Technical Conventions

• The lip syncing and instrument playing is all done accurately which gives the video a more professional look
• The transitions and clips have been edited to the beat well to make the transitions between clips smooth
• Composition and framing is good and you can clearly see the stars without heads or anything being cut off or out of shot

Narrative and Performance

• The narrative to performance ratio is about 50:50
• Narrative is just friends having fun which fits  the vibe of the song well

The artist has been represented as fun, and inviting people who go out and fun. This has been achieved with the use of mise on scene, particularly costume and setting. The performance part was filmed in what looks like a bedroom which has been decorated to give a ‘DIY’ vibe which gives a relaxed and care free mood to these shots. The costume is quite casual and regular which gives the stars more relatable and down to earth. The use of camera and editing shows fun and exciting angles with a fast pace of edit which helps provide the ‘I don’t care’ and ‘just have fun’ attitude.

From watching this video, I can see the standard of what previous students managed to accomplish and what I want to be able to do either the same or better.

This is my analysis of the music video for ‘The Pretender’ by Foo Fighters.

By doing this, I was able to pull apart and decode the music video and learn how camera, editing, star image and Mise-En-Scene is used when forming a narrative and performance based music video. This will be useful to refer to when I create my music video as I am now familiar with the different techniques used to portray a star image and editing techniques to display a narrative.

In this first task, I analysed and deconstructed three music videos by identifying the structure of the narrative, how MES is used in the context of the genre, and how star image was portrayed throughout the video.

By doing this, I have had a deeper look into music videos than I have in the past and have discovered that MES, Genre Conventions, Narrative, Performance and Star Image are all very important factors to consider when decoding putting together a music video. This involves costume, make up, lighting, whether the narrative is relevant to the lyrics or music, and if the video is fully performance, fully narrative, or a mix. When I create my music video I will have to plan all of this out.