Wednesday, 3 August 2011

RS - Deconstruction - Iron Maiden - Can I Play With Madness

Artist: Iron Maiden
Year: 1987
Eddie - "Maiden's" mascot
Genre: Heavy Metal


Iron Maiden's "Can I Play With Madness" music video is under the "narrative" section of Goodwin's theory. The story is based on an Art teacher who is teaching his class how to draw an abbey in which they are located. One student draws a picture of "Eddie" (Iron Maiden's famous mascot) instead of drawing the Abbey. The art teacher takes the drawing and walks off, however he falls down a hole and discovers a lab underground were he finds a CGI version of Eddie inside a fridge towards the end. There is a performance side to the music video too though, while the art teacher is in the lab he watches TV with the band performing live on it.

Here is the student drawing Eddie

At the start with the Abbey location sequence the shots go on for a long time, if the music video is targetted at youngsters (of the 21st century) they would get bored very fast. However the music video was made in the late 80's and therefore the attention span was longer for a youngster and therefore the music video could be aimed at them. Also with Heavy metal being more "acceptable" in the 80's there was a wider audience than today.

The CGI Eddie above the Abbey
When the teacher is looking over the shoulders of the students the camera is very low angle, this is used to show his dominance and power over the students, it is made more clear by a girl looking scared when he looks over her shoulder.

CGI Eddie in the fridge



CGI or Computer Generated Imagery is used on several occasions in this music video mainly because the 80's marked the start of CGI and being used in the music video is very effective. It has been used to add horror aspects to the music video, because Eddie is seen as an icon for gore/horror in the ways he is used on album covers.


Here is the way they used the band performing live on a TV within the music video. The band doesn't appear in person in the music video or lip-sync to the camera they are just seen on a recording on the TV, it's a very simple yet clever thing to do and will not be hard for us to do in our music videos.



Eddie on stage with the band performing live
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1 comment:

  1. DB4 August 2011 at 19:33

    I think the key to grasping this vid is the use of teens. Maiden were a mature band with a decade of growing success behind them, but needed to ensure they appealed to teens to continue selling. Notable too that the teens are both M+F.
    From an international perspective, we get a trad cliche of England: rural, castles...
    But this was also a band at the peak of their commercial success: the SFX denote a high-budget vid - taking in elements of sci-fi, fantasy, horror (traditionally male genres, matching with the music genre)
    The TVs to provide live footage is a nice touch; a postmodern element (Guns n Roses would use this approach in Welcome to the Jungle and other vids too).

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