Craig Davis Music Video Analysis

According to Craig Davis' categories/genres of music videos, we have concluded that our music video is Illustration.

Illustration - 'either a straightforward performance video  or a simple narrative video (or a mixture of the two) that illustrates the meaning of the lyrics and visualizes the music in a straightforward way. It could be called music video 'denotation'.


Due to the nature of the song we decided to classify the music video under Illustration. The original song from our video, and the video that goes accompanies it (Kings of Leon, Use Somebody) is Indie Rock however Pixie Lott's cover version, and also her video would fall under the category of Acoustic Pop due to the pace of both the song and video.

Camera Shots and Movement


For our specific genre and also to coincide with the Illustration category, the type of camera shots and movements which we included were slow paced and still movements with a variety of long, mid and close up shots. We believe that because the music is so simple, and Pixie Lotts original video, the video should not contain flashy or complicated camera movements or shots, neither fast paced movements. Everything should flow very easily, and to do this, a degree of stability and a slow pace was needed. We contained several close up shots of Amy's face throughout the video to create a sense of intimacy and to portray her emotions whilst singing. This also allowed the audience to engage the difference between current experiences and past experiences such as the coffee shop scene.

A sense of intimacy is portrayed here, plus this scene is similar to that whole concept of Pixie Lotts original video which takes part solely within a studio. This relates back to the genre of Acoustic pop.

Editing

We used various transitions such as Non-Additive Dissolve, Additive Dissolve and Fade in and Fade out Dissolves. This is because we believe this made the overall affect of the video very floaty and seamless. This matches the light tones to the song which doesn't contain a heavy beat or fast paced rhythm.

Despite Pixie Lotts video being in black and white, we wanted to keep the colour as there is a very large variety within our shots. We believe that using a black and white filter would be quite boring and repetitive

Post-production digital effects


We didn't use that many post production digital effects as we wanted the overall look to be subtle and again quite floaty and seemless. Special digital effects tend to be used in pop videos, ones with a fast paced audio or quirky or possibly strange lyrics.

Lighting


The overall lighting of the video was very subtle, we used as much natural lighting as possible and never used artificial extra lights such as spotlights etc. We believe that the camera was able to create a very soft and delicate feel to the video due to the shallow depth of field affect that the lens made.