Response to Feedback

I have read and taken on-board the feedback left for me and have embedded all the videos I can at the moment however unfortunately, Two Fingers - Jake Bugg official music video is blocked by the current network I am using so I could not embed this video right now. I will also make a conscious effort to try an analyse future music videos in greater depth and will try to review past blog posts and improve them.

Evaluation of Two Fingers - Jake Bugg

Director - Jamie Thraves
Artist - Jake Bugg
Year - 2012

Category - I think it is mainly a narrative video as for the majority of the video it is telling the story of Jake Bugg's upbringing and life which gradually improves and then finishes with a few shots of him performing on stage so this is why I would class it as a performance/narrative music video.

Visual techniques used - The lighting and mood at the start of the video is quite dark and almost grimey as it shows a bus going past and a street sign. Then throughout the video as the music pace increases so does the brightness of the video and the quality of the shots, almost as if the happiness in the video is increasing as it progresses.

Visuals within the song - The visuals in the song definitely reflect the meaning of the song as it is a song about childhood domestic abuse and the artist escaping this life and moving on. In the visuals we are shown the domestic abuse of two parents fighting and drinking and the artist, Jake Bugg, packing a abat and walking away from the situation.

Evaluation of Stressed Out - Twenty One Pilots

Director - Mark C. Eshleman of Reel Bear Media.

Artist - 21 Pilots

Year - Uploaded to YouTube on April 27th 2015

Category - The music video fits into both performance and concept i think as there is no narrative too the video in the sense that it doesn't tell a story. However I think its a conceptual and performance video as it appears to me that the artists are performing in there home town in their childhood houses, which shows less of a narrative video and more towards concept as the director has thought of the idea.

Visual Techniques Used - The artists put on dark makeup around their necks and hands in order to symbolize the character "Blurry face" in the song which reflects the meaning on the song about this character, "Blurry face" being isolated as in some shots it almost looks like their heads are detached from their torsos due to this makeup.

Genre - The specified genre for the song is Rock, Hip-Hop/Rap. In the rock genre, typical conventions are performance videos where the artists are just playing their song and the actual performance of the song is the main focus of the video. Conventions of music videos in the  Hip-hop/rap genre are many low angle shots in order for the artist to try exert their power onto the audience with the low angle shots meaning the artist is looking down on the audience, heightening their sense of importance.


In Stressed Out by Twenty One Pilots they follow more rock genre conventions than Hip-Hop/Rap as it is based around the performance, however abstract the performance may be.

Evaluation of Student Example

Evaluation of a student example following the advice of Andrew Goodwin's book: Dancing in the distraction factory.

The band in this video is an indie-rock band therefore there are certain genre conventions that are typical for a music video of this type and I think this students example has certainly met the genre conventions typically associated with the genre. The specified genre for the video was indie-rock which conventionally involves a live performance with a narrative in-between to break up the video and give a story to the reader. I think the student has stuck to this genre convention very well as their video shows the narrative of a car being fixed in-between a live performance of the band to showcase the artists talents.

They have chosen 3 locations throughout the video ( A garage, the roads/moors and the main stage at a gig ) and inter-cut narrative and performance between all 3 locations in order to build a relationship between the music and visuals. I think the student has achieved a good balance between the music and the visuals as they compliment each other as the video progresses and enhance the performance during the visual segments.

The student has also used post-production effects, such as the white animation lines, which enhance the video making the audience pay closer attention to the sounds which are being emphasized.The filming of the live performance is deliberately shot with low light so that the band comes across as a whole instead of the lead singer standing out to the audience.

About Me

My name is Matthew Briggs, I am an A-Level media student currently studying business studies, chemistry and of course, media studies. I enjoy creative tasks where I am able to discover new limits of media and the software behind it. I have been studying media for three years now, entering my fourth and will be using this blog to share my progress during this time with you.
In the future I would like to set up my own business as a freelancer designing logos and graphic designs for different companies.