Analysis of our music video

Our illustrative music video as Craig Davis would name it, has clear elements of a narrative. The video begins with the narrative element of the protagonist receiving a text from her boyfriend telling her he's splitting up with her as he has found another girl which is done through a close-up shot of the protagonist's mobile phone. This sets the topic of the music video.

The speed of the music video is relatively slow paced to match the music, however, as the music picks up the pace towards the end, we decided that the video needed to aswell so used the ' fast-forward rewind' effect on the editing software Final Cut Pro, where we basically rewound the whole music video in fast-forward then brought it back to the present. This wasn't just a random thought to match with the sudden fast pace of the music, it made sense as the girl was now over her boyfriend's break-up and then used rewind to show that she was thinking about how upset she was and now she is happy. Other elements of the post-production includes montage editing, we followed the convention of all music videos using montage editing that shows shots from different locations brought together, for example, the final long shot of the first scene in our video where the protagonist is in the park walking somewhere is followed by a long shot of the tram leaving which shows suggests that is where she was walking to and is now on the tram. In a lot of music videos, especially ones of our genre (HipHop), slow motion is now a convention, therefore we also followed this convention by using the Final Cut Pro effect of slow-motion on this shot, making the protagonist look as if she dropped the burning letter in slow motion, which gave it a better effect of the protagonist finally coming to terms with her break-up and getting over it. Like all HipHop videos, our editing is cut to the beat.

Our music video contains a lot of different types of shots such as long shots, close-up shots, point of view shots, pan shots, establishing shots, low angle shots, high angle shots and extreme close-ups. These shots were used for different things throughout our music video, below are examples.

Close-up shots and Extreme close-up shots

• The close-up shots were used for things we wanted the audience to focus on, for example, when the protagonist was crying about the losing her boyfriend, we took an extreme close-up of the protagonist's eyes to show her tears
• When the protagonist was burning her boyfriend's letters to remove all memory of him from her life, we took close up shots of her hands with the letter in them, then off her taking the lighter out of her pocket to burn the letters, then of the letter and lighter making contact and setting alight and finally the paper on fire. These were close up shots to add more emphasis to the fact that the protagonist no longer wanted memories of her boyfriend, and to show the audience that was she is doing is important to the music video so needs focus

Long shots

• Long shots were key for our music video as it matches the conventions of other HipHop music videos as HipHop videos like to include long shots to show the surroundings of the protagonist, which in our case was key as when she was walking around the park, we wanted to show the audience where she is as parks symbolise a lot of things, especially for teenagers and our target audience (13-19) they symbolise love as this is where couples go and they also symbolise heartbreak as this is where people go for a walk to clear their head, gain closure from times they spent here, and to remisince which is exactly what our protagonist was doing. When filming, we made sure the locations we used were deserted to emphasise the loneliness of the protagonist, which was another reason for the use of long shots.
  

Establishing shots and Pan shots

• Establishing shots needed to be used to show where the protagonist was which is key for a video like ours which needs to show places that the protagonist and her boyfriend spent time at so the audience can see where she is gaining closure. We made sure the locations we showed were deserted to emphasise the loneliness of the protagonist.
  

High angle shots and Low angle shots

• At one point in our music video, when the protagonist was sitting on the bench all alone in the deserted park, we fimed from a high angle shot so the protagonist looked 'inferior' and 'small' to again emphasise how she is feeling and lonely she is. At the end of the video, when the protagonist is finally over her boyfriend and she looks at the text from him that told her he was breaking up with her as he'd found another girl again, and she laughs at how silly she was for being upset over him, we film this from a low angle shot to now show that she does not feel small and isn't 'inferior', she's strong again.

In terms of the mise-en-scene, the fact that we used urban clothes for the protagonist and urban locations to match the urban genre of HipHop and used low-key lighting (we filmed when the skies were grey and towards the end of the day so it looked dull), emphasised how dull and upset she feels. The low-key lighting also matches the connotations of 'urban' e.g council estates (used as one our locations), less well-off backgrounds etc.

The factors that make our music video effective is the fact that we stuck with the conventions of HipHop music videos in terms of using minimal special effects, keeping everything naturalistic (e.g not using special effects or the studio) and keeping it 'real' and using a lot of long shots to show the surroundings of the protagonist, as location says a lot about a person, e.g in our video, the locations were the park which was in front of a block of council estate flats which further suggests that the protagonist could be from a less well-off background which is typical of protagonists that feature in HipHop music videos. Because of all of the above techniques, we believe our video is successful.