Technical Analyis Research

The aim of a technical analysis was to look at the cuts made in music videos, what is captured in each shot and the representation of each shot. I chose a song which has already come up in our research which includes ideas of the kind of music video in which we hope to achieve. The song is by The Explosion and is called 'Here I Am.'

The beginning f the song is a narrative of a skateboarder who exits a house and jumps on his board in a city in a rush to attempt to spread some leaflets advertising a band. These skateboarding shots are put together well with many jump shots for example at 00:36 seconds through when the skateboarder goes up the grass bank, on the way down there are two jump cuts. This moves the action on, and makes the viewing of the music video ambient as the audience don't see everything. This can help for repeatability because by the end of the video they can feel they have missed out on certain aspects of the video which in this case would be the skill of the skateboarding. I found that the background and mise-en-scene of what is included in the shot is also important in the shot for example in one of the skaeboarding shots there are posters on the wall behind him which conveys the edvertisement in live music in the area which helps to understand the narrative of the video.

The performance shots can help to relate the consumers to the band and the way they are represented though shot can apeal to the terget audience. The use of close ups on the main singer and the use of a first person mode of addrress crerates a parasocial intamacy with the audience.

Transitions are important in music videos as they can help to convey the tempo of the song and create a mood, for example this music video with in the first five seconds uses jump cuts which helps to convey that the both the song and the music video is going to be fast moving and up beat. Other transitions used helps to differentiate between sections of the music video. This is done between performance shots and narrative shots where by when there is a switch, a flash transition is used to seperate the sections which helps the audience to understand the music video better. However when the music video switched from the narratie section to the performance shot a clever transition is used where the camera zooms in on to the poster that the skater has placed on the street. The camera moves towards the poster then fills the shot. Here special effects have to be used in order to make a smooth transitions so that it looks like the picture of the poster is moving. Capturing this sort of shot in our music video i thi9nk would prove difficult but if achieved would make a focal point of the video.

By doing a technical analysis and deconstructing a music video it has helped me to understand the task that has been set. By choosing the video i did, i think it has helped me to picture my own shots for the music videos with ideas about how to shoot skateboarding, the locations i would use and the type of performance shots which enhance the artists to convey their image to appeal to their target audience.