The frays How to save

a life

Artist: The FrayAlbum: How to Save a Life

Released: 2005Reason behind the song:

According to lead singer Isaac Slade, the song was composed and influenced by his experience while working as a mentor at a camp for troubled teens:

“ One of the youngsters I was paired up with was a musician. Here I was, a protected suburbanite, and he was just 17 and had all these problems. And no

one could write a manual on how to save him

All about the song

Audience Feedback

As we can see from these comment people can relate to the story behind the lyrics/video. I chose these particular comment because I thought they summed up the overall comments which were made about the video. Lot of people also said the video made them very emotional, due to the poignant story.

The frays- How to save a life In this particular video extreme close ups are mainly used to show potent emotions and an establishing blur shots to suggest sadness, as the video is mainly about loss this is probably

why they want to show quite hard hitting emotion in the performance. It's very thematic in the sense that it heavily features 'performance and narrative’; it focuses both on the band but

also the people in the video. As we can see from the establishing shot of a blurred outline of a

man playing the piano this show that although the audience should mainly focus on the band

but they should focus on story to understand the band.

The video has a white out effect and there isn’t any colour around the people who have the loss,

this could show that they have no other emotions they feel empty with sadness, however as the video approaches the end there is a shot

of a butterfly opening its wings, tis could resemble, the people feeling free and happy

once more. Overall this could link to the band image in the way of them felling like in their

lifetime they have experience a lifetime of loss, but the found music, which guided them through

the struggle. This links to Andrew Good wins theory of a band amplifying their image through

both music and the video.

For the end shot a medium close up shot of the main singer playing the

piano, show that the music is very much the main aspect in important to them as a band. Linking to Stuart Hall again for this video men seem to dominant it,

which links to his idea of patriarchy. The piano has connotations of happy,

vibrant music which could link to the end part of the song, where all the

people almost felt liberated.