Video Analysis, Foster The People 'Pumped Up Kicks'

This video is similar to what I want to do for my media video. There is a lot of minipulation of shots in the video, the lighting has been played with which makes it look slightly different and worn.

Camera shots:
The video uses a lot of close-up shots focusing on random objects as well as people, there are also long shots used in the video and I would say theses are the main two types used.

Above: Close-up                                                         Above: Long shot

 The camera often blurs in and out of shots which will have been done by changing the focus on the camera. This gives a good effect with the sounds in the song which are quite dazed.

I would also like to point out the fact that the video uses multiple jump shots. All of these features make the video look quite retro and indie which is the type of video I would like to go for. There are also certain shots where the focus is on just one thing with everything blurred around it.

Lighting:

The lighting varies throughout the video, the contrast appears to have been changed at some points to make things appear darker or lighter. When the band are playing live the lighting is always darker with the occasional bright light flashing past as a laser type of light. These are usually red and blue. We also see the occasional spotlight.

There is a lot of natural light used in the other shots mainly in the outside ones, some artificial light has been incorporated into a few of the outside shots to improve the look and focus of the shots.

Here is an example of natural light in a shot. Below is an example of natural light with some artificial light shining on the person from behind the camera.

Mise en scene:

There are a lot of different locations in this video. I think the most interesting ones are the lake where they are jumping into the water and messing around. This is a very scenic location that ties in well with the video. It is pretty and it is representing youthful things as they jump in. There are also some shots in a more urban area, on a street as well as some more run down looking areas, there are shots in the car and in some open space which looks like an empty car park. Finally there are shots of the band playing on stage. The fact that there are so many different locations is symbolic that the band travel all over on tour to share their music and the inbetween shots where they aren't on stage symbolises the travelling part and the fun things they get up to.

Preliminary Task

Task Outline
Our preliminary task was to recreate the first 1minute 20 seconds of the Britney Spears music video, 'One more time'.

Planning

Our planning wasn't as full on as it would normally be for this kind of thing as we had a set song with a video that we had to recreate. This meant that we didn't have to decide which shots to use and what the video would consist of etc. So a few of the class took screen shots of each shot in the video. We printed them all off and then labelled the shots with who would be in them. We also made sure it was equally spread and everyone had chance to lip sync and film.

Filming

We started to film once we'd finished planning. It took us around 4 hours to record everything. Everyone in the group took it in turn to film a few shots.

Editing

When we finished all the filming between the class we split it into four chunks. In groups of 2-3 people we edited our section to fit the song and the real video. Me and Jonathan were given the last twenty seconds of film to edit in which i edited the first half and Jonathan edited the second half.

Here is our final video:

My contribution

I recorded the section where Emmie played Britney and this was a dance scene. I recorded the scene twice once in close-up and once in long shot. This video is uploaded above. I also recorded a close-up of Zoran singing as Britney in front of the lockers. I lipsynched to part of the song, this was in a dance scene in the video.Finally i edited  from about 1minute to 1minute 10seconds near the end of the video.

Evaluation

The finishing product of our music video is not great, the lipsynching is not quite in time and it doesn't look very professional like it should do. We didn't have the best time keeping skills whilst filming and editing either therefore it was more stressful than it needed to be. I have learnt that you need to be a lot more organised when carrying out a task like this and when I start to make my music video I will have a lot more strict timetable and I will follow it. It was a very useful task to o before our real music video as we now know the pressure that we will be under to make it look professional and be completed in the time scale we have been allowed.