Visual Literacy Assignment #6

This video is a quasi-parody music video featuring a song by New Zealand parody rock band The Axis of Awesome.  The song points out that many of the most famous pop songs of the last 4 decades basically use the same four chords, hence the songs name.  Most of the shots in this video are medium close up shots of the individual band members singing there own parts, mostly just lasting for as long as one line from whatever song they're singing.  However, the video also features shots of two or all of the band members together ranging from medium close-up shots to medium long shots, and in one case either zooming or dollying out to a long shot.  The first time a band member sings, the shot remains on him without cutting away for the length of three verses.

What works best about the video, aside from how catchy the song is, the wide array of costumes and actions performed by the band to parody the performers of the songs they chose for this version of the song.  The video is also very colorful, despite it's consistently white background, which makes it effective in both drawing in, and keeping viewers interested in it.  This works in it's favor since the song is over 6 minutes long.

As a parody, there isn't much wrong with this video, since it's visuals support the mocking nature of the song.  However, the biggest flaw in the video, which isn't really a production issue, is the ending.  Ending on an advertisement for the bands other videos is a needless tack-on to and already pretty long music video.   It also seems pointless since this song is the bands most popular song according to iTunes, so this is what would bring the audience to there channel, and curiosity would do the rest.

If I were to change this video, I probably would have made the background more interesting. This would most likely mean changing it from a white screen to a green screen so other video clips and images could be use to enforce what the song is saying.  I would also change of some of the shots so that the majority of the video isn't just singing into the camera, even though that worked for this as a parody video.  Lastly, I would get rid of the ending since it really had no reason to be there.