Cool Boys - ID# 453

Barrington

Music Video

Entry Description

Over the summer I had the opportunity to travel to Jeanette, Haiti for the second time. There, I created a music video for a local music group, Cool Boys. Four young men use their music to express themselves and their ideas, despite coming from an area of extreme poverty.

Recent Teacher Comments

• 3/7 3:20 pm - You created a really cool music video that also gave us a view into a different culture and location. Mostly smooth transitions to new locations, I particularly liked the strobe effect that would land the viewer in a new setting. But these transitions were uneven, at certain points it felt like you were just grabbing a new transition out of your transitions folder. Page flip felt weak next to your custom strobe transition. Logical edits with the structure of the song. Since the song was in a different language a bit of a story to give the viewer a clue as to what the song was about would have been nice, but I realize this might have been difficult given the circumstances and presumed language differences.

Judge 1

Positives: Editing: crisp, playful, at times experimental. All of these are well-suited for a hip-hop video. Edits to the beat were warranted and well-executed; it helped the video feel connected to the music. Tone: It appeared as though from the Cool Boys to everyone who surrounded them in the video that it was a great time to shoot. The video is fun and light and the variety of locations add value to the piece. The lip syncing was very tight (except for a few brief moments) and that is difficult to do on location so well done there.

Improvements: Story/narrative: I understand that this was mostly a performance-to-camera piece, but attention should still be paid to separating the protagonists from the supporting/background cast. This was strong at the beginning but since they're not well-known figures outside of Haiti it was often hard to discern who our "heroes" are when friends/fans/background were added to the scene. Maybe the point was for it all to look like one big fun time and it doesn't matter who is whom, but that took me out of the video at times. Style over substance: there is no real story in this video to speak of, which is fine because it often works to the advantage of the artist/music in a hip-hop video. But even when story is eschewed for a style or aesthetic concept, it needs to be tied together and feel purposeful. There were filters and transitions used once and then not again throughout the video -- specifically in breakdown portions of the song -- that were interesting and I thought were going to be woven together as part of a larger aesthetic scheme, but never recurred and therefore just seemed like random experiments in style rather than purposeful executions of a concept and played against one another to make the video feel more disjointed and piecemeal than cohesive.

Judge 2

Positives: Great lip sync. Wonderful story about the boys.

Improvements: Camera shots could have been a bit more varied.

Judge 3

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Judge 4

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