Research 15: The New Amsterdams - Turn Out The Lights (Video 13)

I am not familiar with this band, however a friend sent me this video link and it really caught my eye. The main point to make about it is that is has been shot completely in sepia. Everything is either a light brown or black. So there is a lot of contrast and can make uninteresting objects look far more so.

This is one of the first shots. We are looking up from a boat into a tree as we float past the branches. This shot really caught my eye as the random but natural shapes of the branches create a really nice silhouette against the glare from the sun, shining through the leaves. This would have taken quite a lot to set up the camera to record the light in the correct way, most cameras would just make everything around the glare pretty much pitch black, so by taking one of these shots successfully I can really show off the skills that I have picked up whilst on the course.

Once again, we have a clip of the guitarist strumming, this as classic shot, it is amazing just how much it it used. This version of the shot has been done especially well, with a depth of field focussed only on the neck of the guitar. The strumming hand is out of focus, and everything we see after the end of the neck of the guitar is also out of focus. The sepia effect works especially well in this shot given the colour of the fingerboard against the strings and the dark colours in the background.

Similar to the previous screenshot, this is actually just a what is known as a 'luck' shot. I doubt they were expecting a swan to swim across in the background. The camera man must have realised what a shot it was and adjusted the depth of field, making the strumming guitar out of focus, but keeping it fairly visible, whilst catching the graceful swan swimming across the behind the guitar. This shows that a lot of filming can be just out of pure luck. Plus in this case, this shot sums up the genre of the song and is arguably the best shot of the video.

I chose to take this screen shot mainly because of the reasons for taking it in the first place, and by the way depth of field has been used. It is primarily to focus on the emotion on the child's face, but this is helped vastly by the use of depth of field. As a rule, you put into focus what you want the audience to see. In this case the most in focus part of the shot are the child's eyes, and this is where the majority of emotion is expressed. A very well shot piece of footage.

This is the last screen grab that I have taken of this video. The rest of the shots are all very similar to the ones above, with many close-ups of heads and an absolutely huge use of depth of field, used for pretty much every shot. This is a simple shot, where no depth of field has been used as it is more of a landscape shot than an emotion shot. The way the water reflects the sky, and then off the boat really ads to the appeal of this shot.

This is a really good music video to be aspiring to, as the techniques used here are top notch and done professionally. Especially the depth of field shots, a lot can be learned from watching this music video a few times through, and I hope I can take what I have learned from it forward with me to when I shoot my own music video.