YouTube Video

YouTube has thousands of videos uploaded everyday; these videos vary from music videos to stuff made by everyday people. For the assignment we were to look at one of these YouTube videos and analyzed its production value and how it worked. The video I choose was a short film, only a little over two minutes. The video was a parody of Star Wars, using some of the movie’s famous images and props. In summary, the video started like all Star Wars films start; having the 20th Century Fox and Lucas films logo display like the actual movie was starting; except the people put their fake company in instead of the logos. After that the famous strolling of the Star Wars’ episode title comes down and gives a background of the story, except this time a voice reads what the plot of this video is-that during the production of the original Star Wars trilogy a man by the name of Marvin Kaufman made a real working lightsaber and had to hide it and himself after he accidently killed an extra. After the voice finished what was being read, the video goes to a wide shot of a twenty-year old guy-Eric Beck-building a lightsaber of his very own so he can rob a bank. It then cuts to a scene where he heads to an elevator and Marvin pops out and challenges him to a fight. In the end they find out that the lightsabers don’t work like they do in the movie but the Eric accidently kills Marvin since the lightsabers do cut through people. This video’s production was basic, but it had a few wide shots, medium shots, and few cut scenes/cut-away. The one thing that was interesting was that the camera was stationary throughout the whole video but it worked because the characters really didn’t do that much moving. Another thing is that the types of shots they did really showed the emotions and actions of the two characters. For example, when Marvin came out of the elevator, they did a close up shot of him and then an even closer shot of just his eye to show his anger. This video was very funny and made of use of some general filming techniques, but it was enough to make it effective. Below is the link the YouTube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsZNiCSCLXw