Shot Count (Abbie)

Genre: Indie Rock

Shots: Rough Estimate, one minute = 31 shots x 4

Estimate total = 124 shots in 4:04.

I chose a Florence and the machine music video, because their music is in the category of genre that I am going to be basing my own music video on, which is Indie rock. I also chose this artist because of her creativity, and the simple messages she portraits through her videos to her audience. I believe this has contributed towards her fan base. For this particular task, I needed to figure out how many shots were used in the music video and the type of cinematography that had commonly appeared through out the sequence. This task required a lot of focus, which contributed to finding the common cinematography and the less obvious angles hidden within the sequence. I begin by estimating the amount of shots, by counting the first minute and multiplying it by four, I got a estimate of 124 shots in 4:04. Afterwards I counted the shots in the video and got a rough total of 122 shots in 4:04, establishing I was close to my estimated shot count. The cinematography mainly consisted of close ups and shallow focus, to remain the focus on the two personas which were revealed slowly to be Florence Welch and her love interest ( Jamie Campbell Bower) , the close ups were used to show the emotional effect love has between the two characters and how it is making a personal reference to the title of the song 'Never let me go'. The artist herself was dressed similarly to her love interest, which was a simple outfit of a hooded jumper and jeans. This is not her usual clothing which has led me to believe she is relating the particular subject to her audience. Establishing shots were used through out the sequence to reveal the location, which was a Ice rink and they commonly used long shots to reveal smaller parts of the building such as the bathroom and the hallway. The video itself was creatively done, the editing which contributed to the sequence wasn't necessarily creative until the end but the use of elliptical edit, was a nice touch to the video and the constant change I believe help maintained the audiences attention as well as entertaining them and leaving them with a story, the end of the video showed a 'smoke' effect and the scenes had been darkened in post-production which gave quite a disorientated ending to the video.

The genre that the band is placed in is Indie rock/pop and this is shown through the lead artists personal style of clothing which is fairly unique, and also by the type of music and which subjects she pursues to sing about. I was prefer to say that it is more indie rock than pop simply due to the speed of which the songs are sung and the types of instruments used I would not associate with the 'pop' genre. 

Representation: Florence Welch and her love interest in the video are showing emotions towards each other to reinforce the point of the video, which again references back to the title. I believe the video is quite provocative towards the audience to show the strong point of the emotions, which relate to love and the effects it can have on a person, such as happiness when Florence and her love interest embrace on the ice rink. I believe the audience will take this in consideration and/or relate to the video from a previous, current or future part of their lives.

By Abbie Smith