What makes a good student video

By having a good and successful student music video, mise, editing, camera and representation must be considered.

Mise

Within mise, there are many different elements that must be considered and planned well to make everything relevant and fit to the narrative. Location is an important factor as this is where you are going shoot your video. Scouting should be evident to show a good amount of organisation when deciding where to shoot. It must be thought about, accessible and realistic to the video and lyrics. For example, if the lyrics are about being at a beach, you wouldn't expect to see the video shot in a forest. Another element of mise en scene would be costume, which would also need to be planned and experimented as to what looks good. What the artist/s and extras look like has a big impact on the video, as it must relate to the chosen target audience to be successful. As if you have chosen the target audience to be young teenagers, you should look to style and show your artist as fashionable. The costume, in terms of colours, must compliment everything in the video, and again they must be realistic and based on your audience. For example, if the genre is Pop the colours are going to bright, whereas a rock song would be darker colours like red and black. Props is another element of mise, as within a music video props are used widely. They must be well planned and organised to make sense of the narrative shown within the music video. If they are not relevant to the music video, it wont look realistic and thought about, instead looking rushed and of a lower quality. For example, if a microphone is planned on being used, it would make sense that it is included in the performance part of the video.

Camera

To be a successful student music video, it states in the mark scheme to have a wide variety of shots. Therefore, this must be followed in order to keep the audiences attention throughout, for example close ups, extreme close ups, long shots and mid shots. By having a range of shots, it means that you showing your audience the whole narrative in a range of different perspectives. It also shows off your artist, and the costumes involved, which links to what you want your target audience to see. The camera shots must also be smooth and still, not shaky (unless planned otherwise). As if you use all hand held camera shots, the video looks a lower quality and less effort has been put into it. Therefore, by having a smooth shot, it looks professional and better for the audience to watch.

Editing

Within editing, there are different important elements that have to be taken into consideration. The first one is the cutting of shots, these need to be realistic and what would be seen in an actual music video. For example, the main type of cuts used are quick cuts and smooth cuts, as in a professional music video you wouldn't expect to see a spiral in and out transition, as it looks childish. Rhythm and pacing is used when editing music videos, as the shots are cut to the beat of the music, therefore must be taken into consideration when editing a student video. This helps the audience feel the tempo of the video and keeps them interested in watching the video. As if the shots and cuts are slow, to an upbeat song it can loose their attention and become boring to them. Meaning the energy in the song can be reflected successfully if it cut accurately. Another element of editing would be editing the song to the lip sync, this must be done precisely to look realisti
c. The song must be correctly in line with the lip syncing of your chosen artist in your video, so the lyrics exactly match up. If this doesn't happen, it will drop the quality of your video and look strange and poor to the audience watching. Therefore, the chosen artist in the video must know the song well enough for this to be exact.


Representation

Considerations of representations could be to do with gender and age as if the artist is female, there will be certain stereotypes involved. Such as, colours used and how they are presented on camera, female is sexual. This is Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory, a female being looked with the viewer being the eyes of a male. This can be used with the artist being a female or a female being part of a narrative within a video. Another theory to consider would be Andrew Goodwin's 7 theories. These are all to do with how the narrative, lyrics and artist is presented within a music video, stereotypically. By using these theories, it will allow your music video to look professional and higher quality as it is what an audience is used to seeing and wants to watch.

By doing this piece of work, it will allow me to get a good idea of what is being looked for when creating my own music video. Also by analysing the different elements it gives me a clearer understanding of what I can include to make it look of a high quality.