Spike Jonze - Sure Shot by Beastie Boys

This video, directed by Spike Jonze, really highlights the way he likes to incorprut fun into his videos. When watching this we can basically see that it really is a mash of shots of the Beastie Boys 'at play'.

However despite that, there are alot of elements of great ideas within the music video, it clearly wasn't just thrown together. This, as i mentioned in the post before last, is a great example of where Spike Jonze shows us his creativity and intellegence of having the Beastie Boys mime the song really fast so he can then use slow motion on it. This gives the effect of the boys miming in time to the music and lyrics but you can still see that there is something different and slow about it. Its really cleaver and makes it look really good.

The camera angles are less steady than that of Mark Romanek's videos but this is to get Jonze's sense of fun across. For example he uses a crane to give high angle shots however he has clearly attached something to the crane that the Beastie Boys can jump and hold onto as they rap to the camera. It gives the effect that they are mucking around and having fun and we are part of that as the audience. He also uses low angle shots looking up on the Beastie Boys as they rap to the camera. This, and the use of the fish eye lens, that Jonze uses, is stereotypical for this type of music genre within videos. It shows us Spike Jonze is aware of the type of artists he is working with.

The music video cuts on beat and is generally fast paced which, this in its self, is a link between visuals and lyrics. The lyrics are "I don't stop" and this is being shown in the way they are constantly moving and jumping around and the fast pace of the editing.

Two really interesting points about this music video is that it its self is representing postmodernism in the way that at one point we see a shot of the actual crane and the crew standing around it. This is showing it has been constructed which is self-reflectivity.

Another cool thing is that at the end of the video we see them walking through the inside of a casino. Casino's, due to gambling, are illegal to film in. We can tell this by the way it is quick and the camera angle is low down, perhaps being hidden by some thing. This is perhaps used to again reflect the idea of them 'playing' and being 'rebellious'.

Throughout the video there is a lot of CGI with lots of different effects being used. It goes from black and white one minuet to an enhanced bright colour pallet the next. There are also clips/images that pop up of things that they are rapping about, which is obviously a link between visuals and images. This is again is all done to create a sense of fun.

In terms of applying Spike Jonze's elements of fun to our own music video, its definitely something, depending on song choice that we want to include. Perhaps we can do this in any performance shots we take by having actors put effort and enthusiasm into it, clearly like the Beasty Boys are doing here. An element that differs from Mark Romanek, as said, is the different types of steady shots. As we like the high production look perhaps we could have mostly these types of shots and have some more Spike Jonze's like ones to show a different perspective of maybe a narrative and these can be postmodern. This video with the conventions of low camera angles appeals to its target audience. When picking our song we will have to take target audience and therefore the music genre into account as they will influence what conventions we too have in our video.