Music Video Analysis: Mumford and Sons - Little Lion Man

MISE EN SCENE

The mise en scene throughout the whole video depicts an abandoned country/farm room or stage, with a number of lights draped across the scene in a country carnival fashion, everything seems really old fashioned and slightly southern, presenting quite a folk image to fit with the music.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Throughout, there are long shots of the entire band playing to the camera, putting the audience in the room as if the band are performing to them. Then there are close ups of individuals such as the singer, the other band members and sometimes instruments. The whole entire video is performance focused, there is no story like other videos.

Music Video Analysis: Biffy Clyro - Biblical

MISE EN SCENE

In the establishing shot, the singer is in a cluttered, averagely decorated what looks like Motel room, lying on the bed in a casual, relaxed exhausted pose staring into the distance. He then continues to open the curtains, flooding the room with light, a very powerful shot. The surrounding areas which he walks through during the video are pretty standard, a motel lobby, a bar, a public pool and a car park, keeping the tone of the video quite low. He's dressed extremely casually, a sleeveless top, skinny jeans and the typical greased, slicked back rocker hair, covered in tattoos and unshaven. In this video there are no performance shots of the band (I plan on having some in mine).

CINEMATOGRAPHY

It starts off with medium shots of the singer Simon Neil, keeping a neutral tone, not showing much expression or fast movements, then switching to a tracking long shot as he walks through the various areas, and as he gets beaten down, with some more medium shots on his face as he sings.

MESSAGE

I believe the message of this story is that whatever you do, sometimes some things are just inevitable, you just need to get back up again or avoid it completely in the first place, shown in the way he goes through the locations doing bad things, eventually getting beaten up, then cutting back to his hotel room allowing him to go through the day doing good things, still getting beaten up at the end, until eventually he decides not to leave his hotel room at all.

Music Video Ideas

For my A2 practical work I have decided I want to do a Music Video, since music is my strongest point and that's what fascinated me the most out of all of the choices. One of my favourite bands Biffy Clyro, their music videos are often very well directed, quite inspiring with their use of quite odd but intriguing stories which aren't always linked to the theme of the song. I have been debating for weeks on what song I would do my music video around, and it's between Foo Fighters - Walk, or Biffy Clyro - Mountains, both are two of my favourite ever songs, so deciding is going to be quite tricky. If I choose Walk, I'll probably try and stick to a similar, conventional theme of the video (a man stressed out with his 9-5 life eventually losing it and flipping out, but in Foo Fighter's traditional comedic way), but if I choose Mountains, the video that exists for that is extremely peculiar and would be very, very hard to replicate at an academic standard. However, to me the song is about the connection of two people and how nothing will separate them, whether that be two lovers, two members of family, anything. Just an inseparable bond between two people. I recently watched one of Pixar's shorts "Paper Man", a quirky, uplifting 5 minute video of two people drawn together by fate. I'll go into further detail on that in another post, but I would quite like to combine the meaning of Mountains with the message portrayed in Paper Man, but in a realistic, non-cartoon manner.

Chase Sequence Commentary

Completed Chase Sequence

Preliminary Task - Chase Sequence

A few days ago we got divided into groups, members picked at random. My group ended up being Me, Callum and Ryan. We were assigned the task of making a short chase sequence.

Firstly, we walked around examining separate locations while planning some possible narratives. We found as suitable place to film that suited our plan and went looking for someone to help with the acting. One of our friends who was on a free, and was quite good at running etc ended up lending a helping hand, while me and Callum ended up filling the other roles, me being the chaser, and Callum being the victim

We all worked contributed when it came to the camera work, deciding which kind of shots to use, actually filming and other such things. We filmed it rather quickly, all in the space of an hour, returned to the classroom (much to the teacher's surprise) when the battery ran out, reviewed our work so far, then went back out to get some final shots or improve ones we weren't too keen on.

We had a wide variety of equipment available to us. As there was no voice acting we didn't really need any sound equipment e.g. boom mics; the plan was to overlay music to create the atmosphere anyway. However, we did use the tripod and the small handheld steadicam (which wasn't that steady) that was available. The tripod was useful for creating static shots and panning shots etc and using a variety of angles. Although the steadicam was helpful in that it was accessible and easy to set up, rather than assembling a whole tripod every time we wanted to film, meaning we could think of a shot and shoot it straight away, the steadicam did have its limitations, it wasn't perfectly helpful when we decided to run with it, I mostly ended up getting footage of the sky and my face going "oh sh*t it won't stop spinning" rather than the actual acting in front of me) and the nature of the equipment meant we couldn't shoot at any angles such as from below or from above.

Tomorrow we begin the editing, which we will do on the Macs on iMovie. Callum offered to take the footage home and colour correct it on his computer at home on Adobe premier to make the footage look a lot less bland. Neither of us have used colour correction or colour grading before, but using it for our final product will create a cinematic quality that will set it apart from other products. I have began to conceptualize the moving image I wish to create by the end of the year, and with the range of equipment and skills we have, I think it should be something to reckon with.

Evaluation Question 7 - Looking back at your prelim task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression to your full product?