Music Video Analysis – Sum 41 – Fat Lip

Camera/Editing/Mise-en-scene

Camera - ¾ of the shots in this video are mid shots closely followed by long shots of the boy band playing their instruments. At certain parts of the video there are high angle shots to show the group of people dancing around the band to represent the fact of ‘hanging out with friends’ – as the lyrics say during this part of the video.

Mise-en-scene – This band is a typical boy band of the time, wearing skate shorts and skating shoes accompanied by a baggy shirt and wristbands. This image helps illustrate who the audience of the band would be (skaters between age of 15-20 male and female) as shown in the video itself.

Editing – There isn’t a lot of editing in this video that you tend to recognise apart from sections being slowed down to show the pain the skaters go through when they fall over as a humour value. This band is known for their funny videos and carelessness of the world around them. One editing technique that is used a lot is jump cutting, switching from one event to another continuously throughout the whole of the video.

Conventions

The genre of this music is minor rock but more pop/hip-hop. This particular band is a full male band as illustrated in the image. And that particular shot, to me, shows that they are normal teenage boys trying to get somewhere in life in the music industry by rapping to the locals to get noticed.

During the video, the lyrics and video link each other, for example:

1. The lyrics say “As a kid, I was a skid and no one knew me by nameI trashed my own house party ‘cause nobody came” – and the video at this time is a 8year old looking boy with a bottle of vodka or Smirnoff in his hand.

2. The lyrics say “And I don’t give a ___ about nothing!” – Then the video is a drunk looking guy outside of a store arguing with two police men and wiggling his bum in their faces.

Pretty much throughout the whole of the video the lyrics represent what you see on screen as shown above.

As usual, the demands of the record label are shown throughout the video by giving the viewer a lot of close-up shots of the main singer when he pulls certain faces when he is straining his voice. When the vocals switch to a different band member, so does the camera to show who is singing even if it’s for a few seconds as shown in the image.

Within this video – you do not see a lot of female flesh; just a few dancers but they’re

wearing a normal amount of clothing. However, there is a sexual reference on one shot where a male and female are kissing each other intimately near a roadside. This video has a stage in it but it does not represent the stereotypical ‘fame factor’ – as if they want to be higher than everyone else. The only part they are on a stage is when they are surrounded by a lot of people, which is so you can actually see where they are.

During this video I did not find any intertextual references to any other video, person or movie, they just do typical teenage stuff.