Sunday 11 September 2011

Music Video Deconstruction 14: The Lazy Song - Bruno Mars

Bruno Mars is an american song writer and singer from Hawaii although he moved to Los Angeles after he graduated to persue his dream, a music career and suceeded later signing with Atlantic Records in 2009 but is recognised from tracks he has released such as 'Just the Way you are' and 'Grenade' aswell writing lyrics for the songs such as 'Wavin Flag' 'Nothing on you' which he feautures in as well as 'Billionaire' and wrote 'Right Round' for Flo Rida. The video was released in Febuary 2011 has elements of R&B and pop, it was directed by Bruno Mars himself and Cameron Duddy.
 1. Opening shot is of Brunos face the rest of the screen is covered by his hands which then shuffle aroud the camera lense before coming away to reveal 5 men dressed up as monkeys surrounding him, everyone in the shot are wearing the same sunglasses and different colored checked shirts. The video has contextual links to The Pickies one shot video, which they did to go against the idea that one shot video are not accepted
2. At 0:07 seconds the track starts and the monkeys and Bruno all nod their heads in sync (medium shot), the use of monkeys is to attract a child and teenage audience appealing to both boys and girls and is origional as it hasnt been done before.Unlike most music videos there isnt fast paced editing on this and the shot is one lokng take because the people in it are moving around the camera instead of the camera moving around them signifying the director wants to make it look like a home video.
3. The monkeys push Bruno to the back and they compete for close ups like a boyband would althoguh this is just being done for a joke and to be different from other music videos to get more hits (tyhe idea worked as the origional video has over 189,000,000 hits on youtube.)
4. There is then a long shot of the monkeys as they act out the lyrics to the song. Before Bruno pushes his way through back to the front. This video is different to any other as it is all one long take and is a kind of performance video that is meant to look like it has been done very quickly although you can tell by the dancing and how in sync they all are that alot of thought and rehersal has gone into it.
5. At the whistling parts in the song all the monkeys and Bruno move there heads up from side to side at the same time.
6. The dance moves of the monkeys and use of the 'mum' coming into the room is just used for humour opening up the scale of the target audience as anyone can watch the video of gender and any age. 
7. The mise-en-scene in the room signifies a edroom with a bed, sofa and we can denote from the guitar and skateboard it is supposed to be a boys room played by Bruno in the video singing about how 'today I dont feel like doing anything' which is something that is associated with teens for their laziness, but also with everyone on some days.
8. At 1:30 in the video his hands cover the screen apart from his face, making it a close up in this kind of video, and as they come away we see there is a guy dressed up as an older woman signified by the voice that has been overlayed when he lip sync and dressing gown and slippers.
9. The video is made as a joke to be viewed by anyone and just all round fun there isnt much that can be generally picked out to deconstruct as it just dancing which has funny parts to it.

1 comment:

  1. Excellent detail.
    Work on being precise with media language and using semiotic terms
    Also: can you think of other examples of single-shot vids? (I've blogged on this)
    WHY would an artist do this?

    ReplyDelete

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