Tuesday 6 September 2011

Music Video Deconstruction 15

Song: Masterchef Synesthesia (Buttery Biscuit Base)
Band: Swede Mason 
Year: 2011


  • "Swede Mason" is an underground musical comedian who is responsible for many mash-up videos. In an interview, he said this about himself:
  • "I’m a 31-year-old man who lives in London and makes mash up videos."
  • "I’m going to try and keep my head as low as I can. I don’t fancy loads of pictures of me being all over the Internet. The idea of being that recognisable scares me a bit if I’m being honest."
  • For "Buttery Biscuit Base", Swede Mason said this; "I heard the ‘buttery biscuit base’ bit and thought of something I could do, got started then got stuck and had to shelve it for about a year because I was sick of it. After a while you can’t tell if anything’s good because you’ve watched it so many times, it does your head in. The breakthrough came when I returned to it a few of weeks ago, learnt how to make a wobble base on a youtube tutorial, added the sample and was able to finish it. I don’t know how many man-hours I spent on it but from watching the first episode to finishing the video was well over a year."
  • The video samples used are all from a series of Masterchef, featuring Gregg Wallace and John Torode talking about a certain type of pudding they've recently analysed.
  • The video mash-up is based on a vaguely simple drum-and bass looping song, made on Swede Mason's computer using Logic Pro.
  • The video begins with Wallace stating that he likes the buttery, biscuit base; he then repeats this in a loop until the camera changes to a close-up of him talking about "base knowledge", and a video effect is then applied by Swede Mason to add a cheesy shine to Wallace's head.
  • As the scenes switch between Torode and Wallace, Swede Mason begins to use other effects that can be found in Final Cut, such as glints and ripples on the foreground of the videos.
  • There are also intermittent close-ups of Wallace, especially when he talks even more about buttery biscuit bases.
Another editing style used by Swede Mason, where Torode has been superficially
imposed onto another shot, where they say the same word together.
 
  • Around one minute into the video, there is a massive amount of transitions from shot to shot, between Torode and Wallace in different locations saying the word "but", and SM has turned into a verse in the song. 
  • Mason has also used a variety of blurry effects near the end of the video to connote...madness of sorts, at the sight of two people talking so intently about buttery biscuit bases.
  • He also uses a zoom-in technique on Final Cut to express some of Wallace's facial expressions even more, as pictured.

  • The video ends with an array of mashed-up shots of Wallace and Torode describing various food with words like "sticky, slimy, nutty, toasty, crunchy, crusty, gooey" and Wallace finishing by saying "buttery biscuit base" and Torode fading out to black as he says "oomph!". 

1 comment:

All comments are moderated, please ensure the what you write is appropriate. Trolls gon' troll.