Tuesday, 18 September 2012

Research&Planning:Video deconstruction- RavenFace- Spineless

As we have chosen RavenFace as our band I have decided to look at what videos they already have to get a deeper understanding of their current representation and how we could recreate this for our music video.

The spineless video starts with a shot of the band in the distance and the camera is on ground level, focusing on a rock in the foreground, this is the first time the audience sees the band but as they are so far away and not in focus it creates a sense of enigma around them and makes the audience want to see more.  They have also used a effect right at the beginning of the video where the shot is shown in negative first and then flashes back into positive colour with the sound of static which adds a level of disorientation as it flashes so quick. This idea of disorientation is a common convention in music videos for the metal genre. As this shot is shown there is a low humming sound which gradually gets louder and then cuts out, simultaneously the shot flashes to black, this also adds some confusion to the video and make the footage that follows seem more vicious and bolder in contrast to the flash of black.
The first two shots are of the drummer, which may be considered odd as often the drummer can be overlooked in music videos and other promotional products as they tend to be at the back a lot, however here I think it makes sense as the drums are loud in the part of the song, and as there are no vocals it does not make sense to show the vocalist straight away. There are then various shots of the band members which focus on them head banging, again a common convention in a metal music video and one that we should use in ours.  As well as this there are a lot of close-ups and extreme close-ups coupled with a lot of camera movement, which adds urgency to the video and keeps it in pace with the fast music.

The vocalist is only clearly shown as such when the vocals kick in and from here on a majority of the screen time is allocated to him, something that is common in most music videos regardless of genre. It seems after this to almost be a shot of the vocalist, then another band member and then back to the vocalist. However in the first chorus, where there is a bit more instrumental the time is divided more equally between all band members. Although there are still a lot more close-ups on the vocalist.  

We then get a lot more shots of various band members head banging, when we use this in our piece it is important that we match it to the beat as they have here, otherwise it could end up looking out of sync.

Sometime after this we get our first shot of the whole band playing together head banging in chorus with each other. Personally I don’t think we should use this in our video as it takes away the enigma and it may make it look a bit comical.

There is a good effect used at 1:17 where the screen vibrates in time with the guitar, this drives the impact of the guitar home and makes it seem like it is vibrating the screen because it is so powerful, we should look into using this effect at some time during our video.

Another thing I think we could do is best demonstrated at 1:24 where the vocalists reaches out toward the camera as he sings, this gives the impression that he is singing straight to the audience and highlights the desperateness of the song.

Also throughout the song the video zooms in and out in time with the beat, again creating more disorientation, this is something we could try although we must be sure to cut to the beat with this especially.

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