Roll Deep- Badman Music VIdeo Analysis

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    "Badman" music video analysis
This music video tells a short story and is produced like a film. It starts of with an ordinary family having breakfast. A teen age boy enters the kitchen and there is some brotherly light hearted arguments between him and his little brother. all in all the atmosphere is happy.

It then cuts into the next scene where there teenager is walking with his friend around an estate recreational area. Simultaneously the music starts. the two boys walk through the play area and meet their friends. They are now a group of people with a dog. from what each character is wearing we gather that they are trendy adolescents. If you focus on stereotypes then the audience can gather from their race, apparel and age that they are quite a rebellious bunch of teenagers who are more likely to be involved in crime. the character we see are also the primary audinance of the actual song.

Next we see the same charcter in the back of a car. The vocals of the song starts as someone inserts a CD into the CD player. There then comes a shot of the car but the camera is outside the car. During this shot the music volume is lessened and the clarity drops too as if to show that we are further away from the source of the music. This is a technique to make the viewer feel like he is in the scene more. the music then gets louder during the shots inside the car. I think this makes the viewer feel like they are with them in the car.

There are many shaky shots that pan to follow action in the scene. This makes the audience feel like he is in the scene watching what is being shown. the shots are short and snappy and there are many of them. This adds to the the tension because it builds up a fast moving scene and we are not fully clear of what is happening. The short shots strung together are a very effective way of gripping the viewer too. Although the music is loud and being played externally from the scene we hear sounds from the scene including parts of the argument between the teens and school children watching them. This further gives the impression that we are at the scene. It also gives us further understanding of the scene. As the confrontation grows the camera becomes even more unstable to show that there is pushing and shoving involved in the quarrel. The teens fight over a gun and the gun fires and shoots a passer-by school girl. We here the bullet fire and the music stops and we hear school girls screaming. the shooter is guided back into the car by his friend and the music starts again when it shows a profile shot with little lighting of the shooter.

Throughout the video we hear various comments and sounds from the scene even though it is a music video. In a few places the music completely stops and that is all we hear is from the actual scene. It is unusual for a music video to have so much sound from the scene but i believe the director chose to make the scenery sound more audible, and to make the connection between the viewer greater. I believe this music video is very successful in gripping the audience with a combination of cleverly edited sounds from the scene, fast sequences of shots when there was action and camera angles that sit the viewer in the scene.

Although this is a music video, it still helps me with the making of our film opening. This is because the characters in both this video and my film are of the same social type. This video helped see how other sources have portrayed the characters. Furthermore, our film opening will have music over it. The opening will be similar to a music video. After seeing this video I have been inspired to dip the music volume of my film in appropriate places so the audience can hear dialogue and scenery sounds like they do in this video.


By Ash Khan