Research - Music Videos (Evaluation and Comments)

Link to Music Video - 'Take One Last Breath'

'Take One Last Breath' - 'Abandon All Ships'. Another one of my personal favorite rock/metal songs, I especially love the video for this song as the effects are fantastic. The original shots are quite blurry, however with a dark background and stage lights that is of course expected. The effects are put to excellent use throughout this video, the use of slow motion and even rewind to fit drops and different phases within the song is phenomenal. An example of this is from 0:55-1:09, a fairly substantial part of the video, covering 14 seconds, is all in slow motion! However due to the lighting and lack of vocals in this part of the song it works incredibly well. Now, the use of 'rewind' within a music video is something that I am yet to see in any other bar this; from 2:18 - 2:22 the rewind of a Mic Drop is used to fit the Vocal Drop, and it comes across with an astonishingly good outcome. I hope to take some of these ideas and editing tips and discuss them with my group when conducting and producing our music video!

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A second music video I am going to analyse will be a personal favourite of mine: Run DMC Vs Jason Nevins – It’s Like that. This is a great contrasting video to the previous and I am going to go into more detail and bredth about the conventions that make this video so impressive in different ways to music videos within the 'Rock' genre. This video is also a prime example of how a music video can be successful without the necessity of an exessive use of special effects - Unlike the previous video.

Camera Shots:
The Music video starts with a side tracking shot, as the man is carrying the boom box on his shoulder. From this we are able to get a full shot of the man and we are able to get parts of his personality from this. There is a medium close up of the man with the boom box, which shows his expression and body language towards the group of dancers. The group of dancers are shown by a long shot. The video contains a low angled shot which tries to get a full perspective of the group of dancers, this helps to give the audience a good view over what is happening in the video. There is also a pan shot throughout the video trying to show the audience the whole scene and try to show them what is happening. There are a couple more side tracking shots throughout the video, which shows both groups of break-dancers in the video. There is also a close up of one of the dancers faces, which shows that the dancers are important to the video, as it almost tells the audience what the video is going to be about and the close up also shows the characters facial expressions/language.There is a close up of the boom box man’s hand, as he turns up the dial on the boom box. This portrays to the audience that their is going to be some dancing in the video, as the boom box represents Street Dancing/Break Dancing.

Sound:
The music in this video seems to be quite diegetic, as there is a boom box in the video. the boom box is being turned up and then used in the video which represents that the music is only in the video at that time and has not been added in after the video was made. You can also tell that it is diegetic, as people are dancing simultaneous to the song.

Editing:
There has been small parts of editing used in the music video, for example quick cuts have been used in the video, so that one scene in the music video can quickly cut into another scene, so it flows better. This may have been used to attract the audience, because if there are alot of quick cuts between each scene, then the attentionof the audience will be higher. The music video also contains a title screen at the beginning of the video, which shows the audience who the song is sung by and what the song is called.

Misé en scene:
The music video is set in an abandoned warehouse, this shows the audience that something quite big is going to happen, as the warehouse is a big set. In a lot of dancing videos, abandoned warehouses and big places like this are used for the dancing in the videos. Once you first see the people stood in the warehouse, you can straight away tell that some dancing is going to take place. This helps the audience to understand what is going to happen. All of the dancers are wearing quite formal clothes and they are also wearing clothes which people dance in. This shows that they will be doing some dancing in the video as there clothes show their personality and actions. Props are also being used in the music video to set the scene, for example a boom box is a prop and is used to show the audience that something is going to happen which music is needed for, for example dancing.


The conventions used in a music video within the R 'n' B genre are similar to those used in the 'Rock' genre in many different fashions. This is due to the conventions of a good music video fall under the four categories of Editing, Sound, Mise en scene and Camera work, any variation on these decreases the standard of the video.