'Broken' is a song written and performed by Jake Bugg. It was released as a single on his album in 2012. It reached spot #44 on the UK singles chart.
I wanted to analyse this music video because of the effect it has on the audience. It doesn't bear many similarities to what we plan to make visually, however, I want to recreate the way enchants its viewers by seeing how it accomplished this and how i can translate that to my project.
The plot of the video is simple, its follows Jake as he sings Broken in front of an audience of tough bikers and rednecks at an open-mic night taking place in a seedy bar. The audience start out rowdy however Jake's singing calms them down and soon they start to dance and reminisce.
The reason that the video works so well to keep an audience engaged in my opinion is that it puts the viewer of the music video (us) into the shoes of one of the audience members in the video. We relate to them. While he is on stage Jake is completely alone, he has no backing singers or musicians. This forces us to focus on him since there is nothing else to really focus on. I think this is a great example of using mise-en-scene to force the audience to focus on what you want them to. I can use this in my project rather effectively in a lot of creative ways such as using lighting to achieve this.
As the video and song progress the audience in the video begin to pay more attention to Jake as he sings. This mirrors what happens with the real life audience. It is through this method that the video gets the audience to relate to it. I do not think that I will be able to accomplish this is my project since the video that we are making has a rather unusual story and very few if not none will have experienced what the main character is going through.
Tonally, the video supports the emotions that the song is trying to get across such as loss and regret. It does this in an interesting way from a storytelling perspective. As Jake sings the song we get a sense that this is what he has done and how he regrets it. The audience in the video each come to a realization, such as when a man who is about to be unfaithful to his wife sees what he is doing and stops to call his wife or how a fight is defused between two drunk men. The video separates Jake from the audience by never really showing them in the same shot together. This is something that I have found to be common in music videos. They show loneliness or separation by only having one specific character or object in the shot. This is definitely something that I will use in my project.
The Digipak will have four individual pages, the front and back covers as well as the two inside pages. We quickly agreed to have three images, one on each cover and a larger picture to fill the two inside pages.To start the first page we took an image of the actor sat on a hill overlooking swanage. We chose this because of how we all thought it was our best 'vista' shot. Sam used Adobe Photoshop to edit the images that we used.First he cropped the image slightly so that the actor is still visible before finding an image of the nights sky that was labelled for reuse.
He put the actor and night sky on separate layers so that they can be edited independently. This made a new background for the image however it didn't look right. It was very clear that the actor was edited in and looked very out of place. We needed an interesting and creative way to blend the two images together.The reasoning for using the night sky is to emphasis on how vast the world is compared to the actor showing his insignificance compared to the world. This links in with the idea behind the music video which shows the lonely struggles the boy goes through.
