Past Work Analysis - Can't Hold Us

This music video for the song 'Cant Hold Us' by Macklemore was created by past students. In the shot I have used as the opening image to my research, you can already see the thought that this group put into their work. This alone makes the video perfect to analyse as it makes me want to reach the same standard of work in my own video. 

In the establishing shot, you can see that they have already thought about the presentation of their video by adding a transition rather than just having it cut straight from the group's names to the video. This puts a little more creativity to the video right at the very start. You also get to the narrative straight away with the first scene of the video as you get to see what happened to cause the song in the first place. This allows us as the audience to understand what is going on the rest of the video.

In this shot, the group has decided to make this section almost like a comic book. Not only does this imply them telling a story but it also adds a comedic feel to the the entire video by making it feel as though we are reading a comic book which has come to life. We also see this effect again at different points in the video. This makes the video stand out to me as its not like other music video which are mostly just dancing.

Mise-en-scene;

In this shot, we can see the costume of all three of the main 'characters' of this music video. I call them characters as I feel this music video is very good at telling a story rather than being for music, however, I do think that the song they have chosen for this narrative works well as it suggests that they don't want to be held in prison.
The two guys at the back are wearing black and white striped shirts as if they are criminals. They also have black masks and black hats to add to their costume so we can clearly see that these are the villains of the story. The one we can see at the front is wearing a suit (a shirt and tie in this shot) as if he is a wealthy business man. Through out the video, we can assume that this character is the protagonist as he is running from the villains.

Theory;

With this in consideration, we can see that this group has included Vladimir Propp's narrative theory by using character rolls. In this video, we clearly see a hero and two villains. Although there isn't any other characters featured in this video, we still have two character rolls. On top of this, Hero is the binary opposite of villain (good and bad) which clearly shows that they have also included the Levi-Strauss binary oppositions theory. This again stands out to me as I can clearly see the thought this group has put into their narrative theory which is what we want to include in our music video as a group.
In terms of Andrew Goodwin's theory, we can see how they have included a narrative by the story like presentation of the video as previously mentioned. We also see that they have linked their video to the lyrics of the song. For example, the lyric 'cant hold us' suggests that the villains are speaking and they are saying that they can't be held in prison.

HA! Comedy...

In these shots of the last scene, we see that the protagonist has opened the bag that belonged to the villains to see what they stole. In the first image we see the confusion in his face that he was not expecting a chicken to be in the villain's bag. As the audience I was also just as surprised to see that the villains had stolen a chicken. I assumed that the villains stole money or some other kind of valuable loot and by looking at the protagonist's face, I can tell that he thought the same thing.
This adds a comedic feel to the end of the video because it goes against all expectations and a chicken, of all things was what the villains were trying so hard to get back from the protagonist. The fact that the video pauses on a circular transition of the chicken just adds to this as they decide to also play the loony toons theme as they close the video.

- Celine Dior