Student Videos

 

Music Video Review/Analysis

The music video I watched I feel is effective as it displays a clearly frightening, disturbing tone with violent imagery, flashing lights and props used to panic its target audience. It presents the effect the artist intended as they used such graphic imagery and an unusual tone for setting, characterisation, music, props and even camera angles. The artist used a range of visual effects, using different lighting, wether it be flashing, monochromatic or iridescent shades of colour. Aswell as this they used an unlit atmosphere/setting(s) to present an eerie, unsettling tone; the lack of light source foreshadows a dark, ominous ending to the music video. Furthermore, they extended a level of visual affects by onion skinning a background and foreground, allowing movement of a scene in low opacity while the main character is in full opacity in the central composition of shot. In addition to this, while editing their footage the artist incorporated static across the video footage as well as using filters and reversing the footage to make the impression of it being an older/used video, once again giving it an eerie and unwelcoming effect.

The opening to the music video is silent, besides from the natural sound of a river flowing in the foreground. The opening shot being an establishing shot of the lead character helps demonstrate to the audience that they are the focal point and will lead the narrative. The second shot is a close up of a paper boat with symbols of two people holding hands and distorted heart shape, this invokes an idea of the song being about heartbreak or loss. After this the music within the video starts and the audience is welcomed with a frightening sheep/goat masked character who is mainly in the central shot throughout the entire music video.

At 1:40 seconds, the atmosphere and tone of the music video changes to a direct moving shot off a secondary character moving closer to the camera, introducing a new role into the narrative. After this the tone changes again, to romantic settings and holding hands, thus demonstrates a love interest within the video. The swift changing atmosphere merges into a setting behind the character, who is still in the central shot, of holiday videos abroad, thus giving a happier and more cheerful mood. Shortly afterwards the secondary character is seen leading the main role into an ominous door where the footage changes to a bright concert setting of a band playing. More edited/reversed footage is played until the music stops; the artist brings the audience back to the original setting of the river, where they let go of the paper boat into a stream, seemingly symbolism of letting go or guilt.

I feel the artist could have picked a better song that would correlate to the tone of the music video; the lyrics and base of the song being more harmonious than the horror themed video. There may have been production challenges by traveling to different settings/locations to capture certain shots as well as technical difficulties of creating a backdrop that would play past footage used in the music video.

I recognise from other famous music videos, the effect of using reversed footage and grainy/faded shots; I feel this worked well for this specific artist and conveyed an eerie, unsettling tone.