RS - Deconstruction - Dream Theater - Wither

Name of Track: Wither

Artist: Dream Theater

Year of Release: 2009

Genre: Prog Rock/Metal

The music video for "Wither" fits into the category of "performance" due to the band playing the instruments, live performance and lip syncing. The music video is mixed with footage from them playing live, meeting fans, traveling to different gigs across the globe and venues to name a few bits. The aim is to show the whole process of a band tour, what they get up to and how tiring yet fun the process is. Videos that features fans are very successful for the bands fanbase as the fans can be within their favourite bands video, see this too!.

Mikael Åkerfeldt - Opeth. Yes he's in the video!

Wither is a music video that features footage of  the band on tour round the world and shows off a few worldwide landmarks for you to spot!. There are shots of them playing live and also backstage footage such as things like "meetand greet" with fans. Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth can also be seen in the video. Opeth is a prog-metal band along with Dream Theater and he even appeared on stage a few times on their Black Clouds and Silver Linings Tour.

Wither is a different style of song to their typical ones. For a typical Dream Theater song you would expect a 25 minute long guitar shredding, double bass filled epic, however with their 10th Studio Album they went out the way and came up with Wither. It's not a typical music video for their genre of music, you would expect dark scenes with wild effects to show off the "darkness" of the song etc.

Goodbye Mr Portnoy!

The feel of the music video has changed very much however since the departure of founding member and drummer of the band Mike Portnoy in 2010. Now the video is considered as a tribute to him and many of the fans feel the video is a goodbye song/message from Portnoy.

Dream Theater with old drummer Mike Portnoy (second from the right)

The main audience of this music video would be 30-50 however it has a secondary audience of 12-25. The band has been around for 25+ years and therefore the fans have grown up with the band, with the release date only in 2009 the main audience would be of the ages of around 30-50. The secondary audience is due to being brought up with the band by having their parents blast it out of the car stereo every car journey (yes i'm one of them!) and they get attracted to it by that, therefore becoming the secondary audience.

The video uses a few effects such as a blue tint at the beginning and also they have sped up some of the footage to give a "time-lapse" essence to it. Due to the music video relying on the performance side it doesn't have a wide range of effects however it works well. There is also the use of black and white just to make the video a bit more interesting and have more character.

Dream Theater with their new drummer; Mike Mangini! (second from the right)