Evaluation

For my music video I decided to use the song “Clark Gable” by a little known group, The Postal Service. The bands genre is classed as a mixture between indie-pop and electro-pop which both have certain styles that I wanted to depict in my video. Indie-pop groups generally sing in an upbeat style but with the lyrics focusing on sarcastic portraits of society and love, where Electro-pop groups may also include some dead pan lyrics and have possible modern and science fiction references while still using an upbeat style. It was important to me that my video took elements of both the genres to show how the group had mixed the two in their music.

Goodwin stated that “There is a relationship between the lyrics and visuals” and this was my point of focus for my video. I wanted to illustrate the meaning of the song by picking up on one particular line of it and working my video around that concept. The line that struck me as the most important of the song was “I was waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie.” I felt this was important in modern society as the media plays such an integral role in shaping the way people think, and often is the case that many films will show “love” to such a high state of perfection that this is what the viewer expects it to be like and anything other than this perfection is not good enough.

My video revolved around a young woman desperately trying to find her perfect match and acting out scenes from romantic films with a puppet of herself and her mystery perfect man. I felt this worked well with both genres as it was using an upbeat song to point out a sarcastic and possibly cynical outlook on life and society. I wanted to use puppets instead of a real man as it shows a certain detachment from the actress and the society around her. We never see anyone else that the song refers to. This is also shown in another video by the same group called “Such Great Heights” which keeps the two main characters on a space station, never mixing with any other person and therefore keeping the music video and the message behind the lyrics as ideas and thoughts that the group have about society rather than a true account of life.

Indie-pop also tends to follow the pace of the song and use cuts on irregular beats or where the songs tempo changes rather than cutting in a way a dance video would on each significant beat. I think I managed to pace my video in a similar way concentrating on where the songs mood changed as opposed to where the beats were. I think with these points in mind I created a successfully accurate piece with regards to the songs genre.

Feedback from my music video was relatively positive. The concept and the relevance of the shots were easily recognisable by the viewers who all understood the narrative and references to modern society. The use of puppets also proved to be successful in its connotations and seemed to provide viewers with some variety in the shot types as opposed to seeing just the young woman throughout.

My feedback also showed that the use of a cat in some scenes was well liked as it showed that the young woman had at least one companion who was always there for her and the shots of her quickly changing outfits and running up and down stairs while the cat simply followed her movements was almost like the cat trying to show her that love isn’t exactly like the movies make out, but can come in many forms and the cat showing her so much attention was one of them.

My feedback showed that no-one could immediately think of a music video that used the same concept as mine or in the same context. Generally if a music video revolves around love of any kind there will be more than one person in the video to depict this, but as mine remained so cut off from the outside world and revolved almost entirely in one small room it was a nice way of getting the point across and the use of puppets was a good aid to this.

In all I think my music video went well, despite thinking that some shots were too long, for example when the romantic comedy DVD’s are being thrown into a pile the shot seems to drag slightly. However I think the use of puppets and the real and grainy looking light and shots worked well with my theme and I hope that I kept the video true to its genres.