The Pretender - Analysis

The Pretender - Analysis 

Foo Fighters 

we start of with incidental music from the song on a black screen, we then see an establishing shot of a large empty room (a factory or a hanger) as the light comes on we see Dave Ghrol walking toward his guitar, he bends down and picks it up, we then cut too a close up of him from behind him, to an extreme close up of his hands as he wraps a bandage around his right arm, still we only hear incidental music still  

Good Riddance - Analysis

Music Video Analysis  

Good Riddance

Green Day

The Video starts with an establishing shot, this is a long shot of Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day's front man) sat alone on a matress on the floor in an empty room, the lighting is dark through curtains still giving the scene a dark yet warm atmosphere, everything in the room (possibly an appartment) is dirty, broken and bare, the only things on the wall are a few sheets of crumpled up pieces of paper possibly song lryics or love letters? We don't know, the pieces of paper could even be from an old relationship, and Billie Joe wants to say goodbye and 'Good Riddance'.

As the video progresses the camera fades into shots from the appartment and into a city (possibly Califonia) as the shots transition into the city we see car lights pass as we go giving us a sense of traveling from one place to annother making the audience move on as the characters in the song are having to do, the shots go into close up's of expressionless and blank faces, looking into nowhere watching as the day seems to pass them by, the one thing about the video the is consistant throughout is that no one looks happy everyone looks miserable or even lost all of them possibly having the same thoughts in their heads.

There are no real impressive shots in the video there are a few tracking shots as the camera follows and zooms into the characters faces and a few transitions, the video is mainly consisted of close up's and some medium long shots (Billie Joe sat on a sofa during one of the transitions) the main purpose of the video is for the band to say 'Good Riddance' to the 'Punk' genre as they turn to a more pollitical rock band. The reason for the band's change into rock is because Punk was about being indipendent and as 'Green Day' became much more successful they had more record deals and more offers for their music to be played in large telivision shows in America at the time, for example 'Good Riddance' was played during the finale of the American sit-com 'Seinfeld' imediatly bumping up the songs popularity to American audiences. The music video is classed as a narrative music video, this is because it tells a story as well as gives a few shots with performance by Billie Joe, so it has elements of a performance based music video, because we see the lead in Green Day playing guitar and singing, performing to the camera making the narrative based story with performance based elements