Technical analysis Evaluation - Sam

I have learnt from my technical analysis that during the course of the video there are a lot of very short shots lasting sometimes less than a second, and many shots lasting somewhere between 1 and 3 seconds for the rest of the time. Rarely are any longer shots used. The longest shots in the video are 5 seconds long and two are used, the first is shot 2, the image of singer on TV, and shot 4, the second part of the swish pan and then crabs left through the wall.

Every shot but two in the whole music video are straight cuts except the two shots in which the camera crabs through the walls and it is edited to appear as one shot. Even the edited swish pan is a straight cut, again disguised to appear like one continuous shot. The most common shot size i found was the MCU (Medium Close Up) of usually the whole band or separate band members in the frame. Two other common shot sizes were the MS (Medium Shot) and CU (Close Up). Some of the variations used in these shots consisted of shooting from HA (High Angles) and LA (Low Angles). Some shots were static with no movement from the camera, but were generally short just like the majority of the other shots in the video. The longest static shot was shot 2, which i mentioned earlier.

There is not really much relation between the visuals and the lyrics of the song, with possibly "I'm looking like a fool again" relating to the man and his lack of knowledge about impressing girls showing him up again. The narrative fuzz makes it unclear whether he has tried to go with the girl before or whether it's referring to past experiences with other women. The other lyric "Waking up on the bathroom floor" could also be referring to the man and him waking up on the floor, from maybe a bad night, coming home drunk for example, and just falling asleep there. The other parts of the narrative, the man and woman getting ready for the day is constructed by continually cutting back to them between performance shots, completing various tasks like applying makeup and exercising.

Quite a few of the performance shots are repeated including a LA MCU of the drums being played with drums in the foreground, MCU shots of the band from the front with the camera tracking in towards the lead singer, BEV (Birds Eye View) MS of the drum player and finally a CU of the rhythm guitarist playing and moving his guitar very close to the camera as he played.

When planning my own work i will take into account the vast amount of shots often used, and plan my own filler shots of performance and various other things when doing my video. I can also consider using a lot of MCU and MS shots of the band for performance shots, and various CU for showing indivduals playing and singing. The length of shots also showed me that a lot of shots are requiered to fill the time of the video and that often shots are not more than a few seconds long.

Here is the link to the song:

Sugarcult - Bouncing off the Walls (2 minutes 21 seconds)



(Appendix 4a)