Analysis Of Previous Student Music Videos

Group 12 2009
David ford-A long Time Ago

1. Genre Characteristics-

The genre of the video is folk rock, i believe this video presents the genre very well. The use of ordinary clothes such as a shirt and jeans with a hat is consistent with the style of clothing that artists within the genre wear.

The use of a park scene where the artist is on his own is also using another characteristic of the footage being in naturalistic environments and a sense of loneliness.

The colours of the real footage in the park has very bland colouring which is similar to many other folk rock music videos by the use of bold colours being limited as the footage is meant to look as natural as possible.

The use of a guitar is very popular in this genre and the group has used this in their video to emphasize the genre well.

2. Lyrics/visuals

The video makes use of lyrics and visuals well.

One example of this is when the artist sings ''it was a hollywood sky'' the word hollywood is spelt out in the sky of the animated scene.

The whole of the animated sections are narrative and the action corresponds to what the viewer is hearing which is a characteristic of folk rock videos.

Another example of the use of lyrics and visuals is where the lyrics say ''there's a girl by the cigarette machine'' and there is a girl standing in a bar by the cigarette machine.

3. Music/visuals

There is definitely a relationship between the music and visuals as the clips cut at the end of verses and the shots in the park towards the end of the video cut at the end of each bar of music.

4. Demands of the record label

The demands of the record label have clearly been taken into account during the making of this video as the artist is the main character within the sequence including the animated parts so that the audience is reminded who the artist is and so that it sticks in their mind. There is the use of allot of close up shots in the video to emphasise the artist particularly during the park footage.

5. Intertextual references

The music video is similar to that of the video for the magic roundabout fruit party as it uses animation of clay to describe the story.