High School Never Ends - Our music video

As part of our research into music videos we were asked to film and edit our own music video for one of our lessons. We decided to make a video to the music of 'High School Never Ends' by the American pop/punk band 'Bowling for Soup'. After being told we should follow common conventions of music videos we tried to match some of the visuals to the lyrics as well as showing the 'artist' performing. 

We focused on the songs chorus as well as one of the songs verses. This verse was :

'Reese Witherspoon, she's the Prom Queen
Bill Gates, Captain of the chess team
Jack Black the clown
Brad Pitt, the quarterback'

This verse gave us the chance to show each one of these common stereotypes and after attempting to show these through the mise en scene of the characters, we edited it so that the matching lyrics could be heard alongside. This shows that we have followed one of the conventions of a typical music video, as there is a relationship between the visuals and lyrics. The pace of the song is quite fast but there was still ample time to make sure that the images on screen could be seen for long enough, we also tried to edit the video so that it fits with the beat of the music which as well as being another convention,  also makes the whole video flow a lot better.

We also switched between shots of the 'celebrities' being mentioned and the 'artist'. This is because it is vital that the artist is shown regularly so that the audience are in no doubt who is the star of the video, Goodwins analysis of music videos, which we briefly looked at also states that an artist may develop a motif which will be recognised throughout their work, but we did not feel the need to encorporate this. We also 'made reference to the notion of looking' as at one point 'the quarterback' in our video is seen lifting weights whilst looking at himself in the mirror before winking at the audience. This not only helped us to give people a quick glimpse at his sterotypical personality traits but is also one a key element which also features in many music videos, we did not however, show telescopes or the voyeuristic treatment of the female body which is present in many music videos to date.

[will put stills and the video in later]