Today we looked at students music video presentations. Some stand out were San’s which was professional and confident and really took us through a breakdown of the video form, the history of the band and their influence on the video: notably they produce, direct and edit them.

Second favourite was Sean’s video Gosh (Jamie XX) which featured an albino African-American and other albinos of different ethnicities as the main characters. What was interesting about this, apart from the fact it was filmed in the Fake Paris of China replete with Eiffel Tower, was Sean explaining that the director chooses to focus on issues that the mainstream ignores – in this case the treatment of albino people – rather than promoting a band.

‘Wolf’ by Siames was also interesting. It was a hand drawn animation in a Japanese style with a strong narrative story.

 

There was also a Taiwanese music video ‘Tough’ by Mayday presented by Grace about a middled aged man who builds a rocket ship after being ridiculed and humiliated at his low status jobs. Our video will be similar to this narrative structure because we have a similar story of the underdog overcoming obstacles to achieve his dream.

My own presentation was a bit all over the shop mainly because I decided not to read from my paper because it seemed that a number of other students were reading from their work and it seemed to bore the audience. I should’ve just read! I even missed a slide I was going to talk about, dang it.

It was great to see a wide range of music videos and provided ‘grist for the mill’ for our project.