Tuesday 16 August 2011

"The Streets - The Escapist" Deconstruction









Dover
Artist: The Streets
Song Title: The Escapist
Year: 2008
Genre: Rap/Garage
Primary Audience: 15-24



This is a concept video that features the same type of shot repeated throughout the whole video, but in different locations (excluding the first 9 second sky shot), a simple idea, but it seems to work very well and creates a video unlike most standard music videos being produced nowadays. The shots are always still long shots facing the vocalist Mike Skinner's back and nearly every shot is him walking away from the camera in different scenery, as he walks the 770 miles from Dover to a beach in France (a feat he actually undertook), so although most of the video was shot in France, it start out in Dover, as shown in the first few shots by the signs showing ferry departures and a map of the south of England (0:16). Skinner is then show actually on the ferry, heading for France, he then proceeds through villages, along roadsides and over hills before eventually relaxing on a beach, where he is joined by another man and Skinner turns and heads back past the camera (which had been placed on the sand) and the shot of the sea is left to fade to black as the video ends. Interestingly the only time in the video that the shot doesn't involver Skinner is at 2:15, where there is a shot of the moon which fades to black before the video rejoins Skinner with an extreme long shot of him on a hillside.


Last shot

A description of the video by Mike Skinner: "During a great period of intense mixing we decided that it might be nice to shoot a video. This isn't the way the record industry works and so it was under the radar of the label and done totally for us by us on a shoe string. It was totally different from any other promo that I've made in that it was something real that we just filmed rather than trying to create something real looking using lots of people and lots of angles. I feel like it's more than a video in that sense. Aswell as looking quite odd without all the singing and quick cuts"





1 comment:

  1. Its an interesting vid; a challenge to the commercial nature of music vids.
    While such an approach wouldn't work for your coursework (you'd struggle to evidence many technical skills) something like this would be great as an alternative cut, as U2 and many others have done

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