Critique-Rachel Little
The title of Rachel Little’s final project is “Final Project.” Her description is that it is an appropriated video that is “designed to feel like a commercial.” She writes that she was interested in advertisements’ ambiguity, so she used this as her starting point for the video. This work uses multiple videos from different sources and time periods. There is one audio clip of a man’s voice in this video with background music. The repetition of the man’s words matches well with change of images in the video. The repetition also makes those parts of the video humorous. The fade out of the man’s voice when he says, “relax” at the end was a nice touch.
I enjoy how the clips are all from different categories. There are old horse and buggies, current pop singers, Krystal commercials, and more displayed in this video. I appreciate that so many aspects of video are introduced, because even though the separate clips work really well together, I don’t think I would have come up with them myself when listening to the audio. I like the “old timey” filter that was placed over different areas of the video as well as the crisp clips. Having these two completely different looks to the video helped each of them stand out more and seem more purposeful. I do see the commercial quality in the video, especially with how relax is repeated and the “subscribe now” image is shown.
The video images seem to match the background music very well. This works particularly well in the opening clips where the broken and faded images change to the beat. I believe this video is a success because of how well the video and audio are linked, even though the voice was not meant particularly for the clips used. The clips changing with the background music also made this video a huge success. To me, this video seems original because I haven’t seen anything remotely similar to it. This video slightly reminds me of Mollie Jenkin’s video earlier in the semester, mainly because they both used male voices with a multitude of clips that went along with what the male was saying.