Music Video Evaluation Question 1

This is our music video for the song The Competition by Kimya Dawson.
Even though it would be extremely helpful to compare with one of Kimya's own videos she doesnt have any so therefore i cannot explain how they differ and/or are different.
A video from another artist of a similar genre which i will compare and contrast however is Dance Anthem by Regina Spektor. To substitute not having one of Kimya's Videos i will also compare Corinne Bailey Rae's Put Your Records On as this is another of the same sort of genre and one that i have done a textual analysis on in the past.





The main elements to this genre we feel is that despite trying to sell to as many pople as possible the artists want to fit into the niche market and like to think of themselves as independant, without being referred to as the typical indie sub culture. It would seem that in the majority of these artists videos the lead vocalists are the main characters and a lot of the time are having a good time or are light hearted. Regina Spektor may be an excpetion to the good time rule but her videos are still light hearted and i think ours is particularly so - hitting people in the face etc. I think keeping to that typical convention was important for our video because at best its difficult to find the defining rule of an anti-folk video and without this aspect it would be even more so.
As the lead singer is most of the time the one in the narrative of the video we thought fit to do so also so even if an audience only was a short clip of the video they could still tell who it was performing.

Featuring in both the Regina Spektor and the Corinne Bailey Rae videos another typical element to this genre of music is having the location set outdoors during daylight hours or close to dusk. Again we stuck to this convention as we liked the idea of riding a bike (presumably as did Corinne Bailey Rae) and riding a bike inside would have proved alot more difficult.

One thing that is predominant in videos of this sort of nature is the use of stop motion. Although the 'Put Your Records On' video doesnt contain any I know alot of the Regina Spektor stuff does and we liked the look of this opening sequence from Dance Anthem of the 80's so we used some to represent the character crying. We thought it gave a video a nice effect when it swaps to stop motion every now and then, even if we did just use it the once.

Having just one narrative location is typical as well, and if not one then two or the bare minimum. The Corinne Bailey Rae video has only 2 and Regina Spektor's has only one! Our video, like Dance Anthem only has the one but is a big location as most of the shots are tracking.

Unlike either of these videos though and one way our video does challenge the genre convention is that ours has many flashbacks (filmed in sepia) which are a lot of different locations of different places the character has been in her life.

All in all our video pretty much follows all conventions of the norm for this genre, it has strong elements from both the above videos and a lot of our own ideas based on the conventions and fits into the anti folk category quite nicely in my opinion. Our production does only really differ in location but even this difference is surrounded by similarities in that the type of location is extremely similar.