Songs Like Ours

Now we have decided on our song that we are going to use for our final piece. We have now decided to research songs like Oasis "Little By Little" At the beginning of this song there is a slight echo and then resumes after each chorus. 

The video starts on the image of people walking around a dark street on a rainy day, holding umbrellas. The mise-en-scene is particularly noticeable in this part of the video as the video is edited so that the shot is in black and white apart from the umbrellas. It is a band performance as we can see the artists performing and playing the instruments rather than a dance routine or   strong narrative. The genre of this video is alternative rock and common conventions of this genre within videos are the use of dark colours and simple settings.

This is shown within this video as the main location of the video is set on a street which is seemed to be shot in minimal light. Other common conventions are that there is a lot of emotion shown through facial expression particularly through close ups to express this emotion fully to audience. This puts John Stewart’s theory into practice as he explored the use of lighting and close ups to focus on the star’s face. We can also comment on Andrew Goodwin’s theory of close ups as this can help when relating and communicating with the audience. The lyrics of the song suggest the idea of taking things for granted and not appreciating them, this can reflect the choice of black and white throughout the video with the odd tint of colour.  To attract the audience particular shots are used to help the audience communicate or relate to the artist. Also sightline helps the audience to communicate to the artist as they feel they are personally singing to them. The costumes in which are worn throughout the video relate to the audience as it can be seen to be what the audience wears or “the guy of the street” look. The Mise-en-scene of the piece includes the props of the guitars. This demonstrates the idea of the talent aspect whereas the image they are going for is perhaps more musicians rather than stars.  When looking at the mise-en-scene of the piece we can comment on the atmospheric dark location in which the video is set. This links back to common generic conventions of rock videos as they are usually seen to be shot in dark or use minimal light exposure to give the sense of emotion.

When looking at camera angles and editing we can pick out particular shots which emphasize the artist’s image or communication with the audience. Synchronized editing is demonstrated throughout the video and this is shown at 0.40 seconds. The affect of doing this is that the audience thinks that the artist is performing specifically for them especially with direct sightline which makes the video artist seem personal to each member to the audience. Towards the beginning of the video editing techniques are used to make one of the artists look considerably small to the other characters walking in the street. The connotations of this are that it could be portraying the idea from the song title “little by little” and putting this into the video. To capture the main artists a variation of shots are used but mostly the use of close ups and mid shots are used. Editing techniques such as panning and tilt are also illustrated throughout the video to create this variety when shooting the artists.

Throughout the video we can look at various representations. The most noticeable one would be how the artist on the street is represented when he seems to reduce in size. This is done by using a low angle shot. The affect of using this is that it makes the audience feel sympathetic and curious about his height. The sound of the song doesn’t appear to change throughout the video. Although in some video’s added sounds are included for the video that is not in the airplay version because the video can be made after the single is released and if extra sounds are included, this could attract the audience as they havn’t heard this version of the song with small added extras.