WS - Deconstruction - If You Wanna - The Vaccines

"If You Wanna" is a song by the London-based Quartet The Vaccines. The song is on the bands album "What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?" which was released in 2010.  The song peaked at number 53 on the UK charts.

The reason that I have chosen to do a deconstruction of this video now is that it is completely performance based. This is unusual because music videos would normally be a hybrid of two of Goodwins three types of video (Narrative, Concept and Performance), like Professor Green's "Read All About It" for example. One of the main reasons videos tend to incorporate two aspects is to avoid the video getting boring and repetitive. With this video only using the performance aspect, there must be other ways they have tried to make the video interesting, and I hope to take inspiration for this into our group work to use on the parts of our video that are performance based.


The video was directed by Douglas Hart, a British musician and music video director who had previously worked on videos for the likes of The Stone Roses, The Libertines and The Pet Shop Boys.


As I have previously said, the whole video is made up from performance based footage. There are a number of reasons a band might do this ranging from it been different to what we expect from a video to the fact that The Vaccines are a new and rising band, meaning they will not yet have access to very big budgets. A performance video is probably the cheapest to make as you do not have to pay actor fees and can if needs be just stick to one location. A video of any sort however is good for a rising band as it increases the amount of ways in which their music can be heard and obviously now viewed. Videos by The Vaccines do seem to incorporate performance aspects, even if hey are not entirely performance based (Wreckin' Bar (Ra Ra Ra), Blow It Up and Norgaard being good examples of this).


Despite the video only using one of Goodwin's three types, it stills works effectively and follows some typical conventions. Throughout the video the pace of the editing varies; at certain points the editing is quite fast and the shots are short like we expect in music videos. This isn't the case throughout however, as the pace of editing is slow at points and adds variation to the video which helps to avoid the video becoming boring.


Another way in which the Director has tried to keep the video interesting and entertaining is through the lighting. This is very notable early in the video and a really good effect is when they have the lighting flashing in time with the guitar. During the video the colour of that lighting changes, which makes the visuals different throughout rather than being really repetitive and boring.


I have already mentioned the pace of the editing in the video, but this is helped significantly by the variation in shots seen throughout. A common convention of music videos is for there to be variation in the shots and this video has plenty of it. This is something we will certainly be looking to include in the performance aspects of our own video.