Analysis of previous student work

The beastie boys-Triple Trouble



I feel this video is the best out of the student examples I’ve seen. It is primarily a performance video however it does contain some elements of concept. For most of the video we see the 3 rappers performing to the camera, however this is done with such a variety of locations and different colour effects that it doesn’t really get boring, for example they continually use green, blue and yellow tints as well as other effects. The performance is very good indeed with almost perfect lip sync the whole way through, although it does fall down a bit at the end.

One thing I particularly like about this video is the amount of creativity involved, for instance at one point one of the guys raps in the same frame as another one of him; this effect must have required some kind of layering technique. Additionally they match lyrics to visuals well at some points by jump cutting to images, for example the line “What the Helen of troy is that?” is accompanied by pictures of Helen of troy. The video clearly isn’t very high budget and not of amazing quality however the style they use works very well with choice of track.

One area I think they fall down on is the fact that for some of the time the pace of editing does not match that of the song, for example at the start of the video they zoom through the street, this doesn’t match the more relaxed pace of the intro. The lighting is also rather poor at some points although this is fairly understandable since almost all of the video is shot outside, for our video we will have to make sure the lighting is consistent throughout and that we can control it as much as possible.

For our own video I think it would be good to pay a lot of attention to the pace of the song so that we may be able to effectively cut on beat throughout the song. We will also need to make sure that our performers are properly briefed so that they’ll be able to put on a good performance.

The Prodigy- Out Of Space



This video is more of a concept video than anything else; I feel it does particularly well in including a wide range of images to match the feel of the tack. For example there are shots of everything from the sky to the Teletubies, with a variety of different editing techniques applied. Additionally the effects used in post-production all assist in matching the visuals to the music; they often apply a variety of effects onto on image. For example the have a skull opening at one point with electricity appearing to flow out. This matches the lyric “I’ll take your brain to another dimension”.

Apart form the effectiveness of the post-production effects I feel this video falls down in many places, for instance the mise-en-scene is very inconsistent which causes the continuity to suffer. The lighting is also very poor, as with the other student work this is probably due to uncontrollable locations but something could have been done about it in some cases. A lot of what is happening in the scenes depicted doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the video which makes it difficult to connect the track with the video as well as this most of the editing does not match with the pace of the song, although I have to admit there is some very effective cutting on the beat in some shots/ transitions.

This video also shows that we should work particularly hard on making the mise-en-scene fit the tone of the song in addition to effectively cutting on beat during the song. I also feel it will be necessary to use back-up lighting for our inside shots as well as our outside ones if it is possible.

Brent Brown- I Will Remember You



This is another performance video; it features the singer performing in a range of woodland locations with and without his guitar. The relatively secluded location seems to match well with the sentimental feel of the song. I also like the good variety of shots used, these have been edited together in a way that flows well. The creators have also done a good job of following the conventions of the singer/ songwriter genre, in particular they focus all the attention on the singer as oppose to anything else.

Another area where this video succeeds is through the performance which is consistently good for the duration of the video; however I do feel this is overshadowed by the poor lip sync which makes the performance feel less convincing. There is also poor sync with the music to his guitar playing. Additionally the lighting is fairly inconsistent which again is due to the outside nature of the location.

Looking at these student examples shows that the main areas people have fallen down on in the past have been related to timing the music to match the visuals, creating an effective mise-en-scene and controlling the lighting, therefore we will try not to make the same mistakes in our production.