2. Artist: The Fray
Album: How to Save a Life
Released: 2005
Reason behind the song:
According to lead singer Isaac Slade, the song was
composed and influenced by his experience while working
as a mentor at a camp for troubled teens:
“ One of the youngsters I was paired up with was a
musician. Here I was, a protected suburbanite, and he was
just 17 and had all these problems. And no one could write
a manual on how to save him
All about the song
3. Audience Feedback
As we can see from these comment people can relate to the story behind
the lyrics/video. I chose these particular comment because I thought they
summed up the overall comments which were made about the video. Lot
of people also said the video made them very emotional, due to the
poignant story.
4. The frays- How to save a life
In this particular video extreme close ups are mainly used to
show potent emotions and an establishing blur shots to
suggest sadness, as the video is mainly about loss this is
probably why they want to show quite hard hitting emotion
in the performance. It's very thematic in the sense that it
heavily features 'performance and narrative’; it focuses both
on the band but also the people in the video. As we can see
from the establishing shot of a blurred outline of a man
playing the piano this show that although the audience
should mainly focus on the band but they should focus on
story to understand the band.
The video has a white out effect and there isn’t any colour
around the people who have the loss, this could show that
they have no other emotions they feel empty with sadness,
however as the video approaches the end there is a shot of a
butterfly opening its wings, tis could resemble, the people
feeling free and happy once more. Overall this could link to
the band image in the way of them felling like in their
lifetime they have experience a lifetime of loss, but the
found music, which guided them through the struggle.This
links to AndrewGood wins theory of a band amplifying their
image through both music and the video.
5. For the end shot a medium close up shot of the
main singer playing the piano, show that the
music is very much the main aspect in important
to them as a band. Linking to Stuart Hall again for
this video men seem to dominant it, which links
to his idea of patriarchy. The piano has
connotations of happy, vibrant music which could
link to the end part of the song, where all the
people almost felt liberated.
