Video Analysis 2: Best of you, Foo Fighters

My second video analysis is of the Foo Fighters hit song 'Best of you'. The video was directed by Mark Pellington, who was the one that chose the theme of the video and not the Foo Fighters. The genre of the music is rock and this is expressed across the video with the band performing live on an abandoned hospital. The main characteristic of the video is dealing with the pains in life and making sure you make the most of this by doing your best in it.
The first 44 seconds of this video is just a close up on the microphone with Dave Grohl (the lead singer) leaning in and out of the shot singing the opening verse and first chorus. This is very rare for any music video to be like this but the tempo of the music is slow and the lyrics are the main feature of this opening sequence. The video does have some shots of imagery that represent the vocals of the song. The shots involve two young children playing, a car crash, a lion hunting, a snake attack, a zebra kicking a zebra, a snarling wolf, crash test dummies in a car crash and men and women showing affection for one another. All these shots helps to add a representation to the video that it is based around nature, youth, love and death. I feel that the video is amplifying the effect of death through nature and that you should give your all before you die.
The video does start off very slowly but when the pace of the song picks up we start to see more shots in the video. The video does cut to the drum beat but some of the shots are so quick that they don't stay within the beat but the effect still works as the lyrics are represented outside the beat. After 47 seconds the whole band start to play and this is when the shots become short and there are far more unlike the opening 47 seconds where it's just Dave Grohl singing into the microphone.
The performance of the band shows extreme passion as they are all giving there all in this performance. The record company could be looking at selling this record through the passionate performance of the band as it would shows their fans they are very passionate about this song which could lead fans to share the same feeling. The filming of the bands performance is with a handheld camera which helps to add the effect to the viewer that they are closer to the band. This is seen in most performances in music videos as a static shot doesn't give the same effect as a handheld shot because if you were at a live gig of the artist you would be moving around and not standing still.
One thing i noticed about the Foo Fighters is that they always wear jeans and a t-shirt along with trainers. This is a very casual look for a band but one that is common amongst most rock bands. However the difference between this video and all their other video's is that they are all wearing black as if their mourning. However after researching the video i discovered that the director of the video had seen his wife die a few months prior to filming. This is the reason why mourning and death are very common in this video.
Overall this music video is based around a performance by the Foo Fighters with some imagery seen in short cuts within the music video. The shots of the live performance are all handheld but the shots are cut very quickly so that we can get a view of the whole band very quickly. This video to me is all about the passionate performance given by the band and this would have been made to be this way by the director. From this video i have learnt that you have to show the band up close and personal to get a better effect, this is something i plan to do in my groups music video. This is the video by Foo Fighters for 'Best of You':

Second day of Filming

After filming for the first time to our new song i was optimistic that it would go better than previously. We arrived and we were instantly handed the task of getting the hall decorated to the way we wanted. This was far more time consuming than we had thought it would be and it took an hour and a half to fully set up, which was far to long. After setting up we then had a problem of what shot to do and how to do it. Once again we hadn't learnt from our previous mistake. However we had got some filming done which we will upload to final cut and edit it to see exactly what we can do with original filming. Once again we failed to use our planning to help us film and i will address the group about this along with our overall effort to get the job done as i feel this is holding us back from getting our music video done. Overall this filming session wasn't as productive as i hoped it would be but we got enough work done to help us build upon which should leave us in good stead for our next day of filming on Saturday.

Animatic of Music Video

This is the animatic of our music video. This is basically a video that i made on behalf of the group that showed when we would use the shots with the song and it also shows where we would use our transitions. This is only a rough plan and i would expect us to use more shots than we planned and more transitions. I think that the animatic will be different from our final video as editing still images means you can't see the instruments being played but this is only a representation of what we want the video to look a little bit like.

Storyboard Images

These are some of the images we drew to help us plan what kind of shots we wanted to do whilst we were filming.

Pre-filming blog

After a change of song we decided to re-think some of our original ideas and look at new angles and new shots that were now available to us through a change of idea. We had moved away from the concept of doing a story-based video to the idea of video a live band. We had immediately brainstormed some ideas that we thought were very promising and we were all eager to get filming. We started to talk about where we should film. Our initial idea was to film in a garage where our selected band normally practice. This would look authentic to a 'band practice' session which we could be representing. However group member Jacob said he could get hold of a scout hall and excellent lighting which was a great opportunity we couldn't turn down. So on Sunday 30th January we were going to film for the second time. We had an early problem when the bassist was miss-informed about the time of our filming which was down to our poor communication with him. The problem was resolved when already had someone else available to play the bass which was a nice piece of planning on our behalf. We estimate we will have around 3 hours in which to film so we should get enough done to start editing next week.

Change of Song

After all meeting up in the classroom for the first time since filming we started to all blog. This was when Jacob turned to me and said he didn't feel the video was going to work if things stayed the same. I strongly agreed with him and told the rest of the group, Tom and Alex, that we should seriously consider changing the song and using more reliable actors. We then went back to our original shortlist to see if there was one song we could use. The choice that two of us believed to be a good enough song was 'Times like these' by the Foo Fighters. After learning from our mistakes we decided to focus on the prospect of filming a band rather than a 'story'. We had some ideas for shots that we would want to use and quickly drew up our storyboard. After putting our minds into this idea for the past two hours we discovered we had done more work in one lesson than we had done in a week. We have spoke to band we know that cover the song at their gigs which means all thats left to do is find a suitable location.

First Day of Filming

On Saturday we started to film our music video to Frank Turner's Photosynthesis. We all met at our actor Jon at his house where we planned to film in his basement. I had never been there before but was told it would be a good location. Upon arriving i saw that the room wasn't what i imagined and that there was only one corner of the room we could film. As the rest of the group started to arrive we placed our camera and tripod down and we were ready to start filming. Our only problem was that Jon, our actor, didn't know how to play or know the lyrics to our song. This meant a large delay on filming which then made us all lose attention and in the end we had no-where near enough footage to what had hoped to film. This is very disappointing as we had hoped to get a considerable amount done on our day of filming and to make matters worse, our actor was unavailable on the sunday which meant we had practically wasted a weekend of filming. We then discovered we may not be able to meet each others date of availability which put our while project into turmoil.