Analysis of Costume

Although in some ways our video goes against the conventions for performance based rock videos we wanted our costume to clearly represent a rock video.  We have three members of our band; Jack the lead singer and guitarist, Matt the bassist, and Theo on keyboard.  Above is an image of our band together.

Firstly we decided after studying and analyzing The Foo Fighters video ‘The pretender’ we aimed to emulate the look provided by the lead singer Dave Grohl, e.g. black jeans, white shirt, dark hair and dark punkish shoes. The decision of this was because the dark clothing represents the dark heavy sound of our song and the stark contrast of the white t-shirt shows that Jack is the light of the band and has been reborn as he’s singing about his past troubles. This is shown through the lyrics (see previous post) and the flash of the church at the beginning.

The bassist; Matt, we decided should look more grungy and more heavy rock as to take less attention from the lead singer. To get this look we simply gave him a beanie hat, this almost covered his eyes. Through Intertextuality and a shared social code, this shows he doesn’t want his identity shown and this keeps with our theme of fighting against the establishment and being underground. He also assumes the role of the ‘Head banger’ in our band a convention or rockers when songs get to deep heavy beats they bang their heads up and down and usually move there long hair about. Matt doesn’t have long hair, so this is another technical reason why he wore a hat along with a dark brown t-shirt black jeans and black shoes.

We decided to include a keyboardist in our video because the song has a lot of synth in it. Theo the keyboardist was probably the most difficult to dress as a keyboardist in a grungy rock video isn’t really going with conventions which we were trying to do with the costume. So we chose dark clothing such as brown hoody and navy trousers and vans, to again show he doesn’t want people to know his identity. We decided also to in some shots to replace him with a mannequin this would be fairly abstract and shock the audience but It does have a purpose. When we were discussing how keyboardist aren’t shown in rock videos when in some rock bands they would still need them, it showed the music companies have clearly thought they don’t look good enough or are important enough to be in the actual band and only play for them and don’t appear on cover or in videos. So we included a mannequin to show how if music companies change and remove things from indie acts even more, then bands will become faceless and not have an identity and how some bands don’t even play their own music live so might as well be replaced with mannequins.

Posted By MaD