RS - Deconstruction - Aerosmith - I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing

Artist: Aerosmith

Song Title: I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing

Year: 1998

Genre: Rock

Director: Francis Lawrence

Audience: 15-24

Aerosmith's classic music video for "I Don't wanna miss a thing" is basically a hybrid between a narrative and a performance music video. The music video contains lots of footage of the band performing and lip syncing to camera however it also follows the narrative of the film Armageddon and contains scenes from the film throughout the music video cross cutting between the two. The music video contains a cameo from Steve Tyler's (the frontman of Aerosmith) daughter Liv Tyler who plays Grace Stamper in Armageddon she is also in other Aerosmith music videos acting, an example of another is Crazy. The music video was awarded with the title of "Best music video for a film" and "Best video".

This music video follows the typical codes and conventions and like every other video I have deconstructed has the frontman lip-syncing to the camera. There is limited movement from frontman Steve Tyler mainly because the day before he "hurt" his leg and so most of the shots are above his waist or just showing minimal movement from him.

There is an obvious focus on the frontman which is typical of a music video the reason for this is so that it looks like he is looking right at the audience and targetting just them watching to involve them a bit more, it's also because instruments don't really target the audience completley but lip syncing does.

Throughout Steve is on tv screens within the narrative and film footage which is similar to the music video for Iron Maiden's "Can I play with Madness" which I blogged on here. This technique is very easy and I have considered using it in my own music video because of it being so easy just using multiple layers, it is possible using Final Cut.

The music video contains various locations which are very large in size signifying that the video is high budget. Also with the planes flying over head this reiterates the fact that the budget is high. Finally because of the music video containing footage from the film they would have had to buy the rights to be able to put the footage in, ending with a high budget from that too.

The music video contains several clips of the different band members playing their instruments which is yet again typical for the genre of the video. This is for the performance side of the music video and shows them playing the instruments and lip syncing to the camera, as if they are looking directly at the audience.

The music video uses cross cutting to switch between scenes from the film and the shots of the band perfoming to the camera. This is very typical of a music video which contains footage from a film, it can be used to tell the story of the film but also have the band performing to show them off too.

There is a very good shot here of the band performing with the smoke from the rocket (which is from the film footage) covering the band, showing that the performance location links into the film footage. It also shows that the video was high budget if they used huge smoke cannons to cover the band.

The footage from the film uses lots of special effects (sfx) within it mainly because it was a blockbuster film but also to show off. With lots of special effects in the film footage it ment that they didn't have to add many effects in the performance footage because otherwise it would be a bit over the top.

The different locations for the performance scenes relate to the narrative so that it doesn't seem very random. Overall the takes are fairly long and the editing is slow however with the ammount of sfx in the film footage it keeps the audience entertained and it doesn't really matter that the shots are overall quite long.

There are lots of tracking shots used in the music video to give a very smooth shots, if we wanted to do this in our film we would have to make our own tracks, which is very hard and expensive to do. There are also lots of panning shots in the video using cranes which is typically showing a fairly high budgetted video, and again we do not have the equipment available to do that type of shot.