Evaluation: Adele “Someone Like you” Music video

For my task of sweding a music video I chose to do it with Adele’s song “Someone Like you”.  This is a narrative music video and involves Adele walking a singing throughout the majority of the video. The girl in this video is Laura, who I worked with to make the entire video. The reason I chose to do this song is because it seemed simple and relatively easy to replicate. The video does lack a lot of technical features, such as a variety of camera shots, different lighting and the use of props and costume. Therefore when it comes to making my final music video I may consider this genre of music because by having to worry less about these aspects, it will allow me more time to work on other parts of manufacturing the video, such as editing each frame to look more suited to the specified genre I have chosen.

When making my music video the thing I struggled most with, was when I was using final cut express to try and make the miming of the lyrics parallel with the song. This is because it has to be correct to the second, otherwise the miming looks out of sync. Even though it’s not essential to get the timing perfect, as a result it made the video look more aesthetically pleasing, so it was worth spending more time to make it perfect, therefore, now I know that my final music video will look better if I make the timings perfect to the second. To make it easier I played the song while filming so that the person miming could sing along to it, therefore I will use this strategy when it comes to filming my actual music video. However the video itself still had to match the official video, therefore each frame had to be cropped down, and this is what made matching the timings difficult. Another aspect I found difficult was making each frame flow perfectly. This is because almost the entire video involves the person (Laura), walking, so the position of her body and legs at the end of one frame, had to be exactly the same as the beginning of the next frame. Therefore when it comes to my actual video I will allow more time to film, as I now know how difficult it is.

As the narrative in this music video was not very complex it didn’t require a large amount of time to produce the actual filming of it. Overall it took an hour and a half to film the entire video with a few extra takes on various frames. We gave ourselves a maximum of 3 hours that day so we finished with plenty of time.

The thing I liked about this music video is the use of crabbing shots throughout it. These complimented the video as the main focus was always on Adele so the use of this camera movement allowed the audience to see her at the same angle for longer periods of time. Therefore when it comes to my final music video I will use crabbing shots when I want to keep the camera fixed at a certain angle for longer periods of time. As my genre is likely to involve more than one band member this will be an effective shot for showing all the band members at the same angle.

By Bradley Norris