Music Videos - Full Analysis

Take That - Said It All

The music video for Take That's "Said It All" is interesting in its use of binary opposition (as understood by Levi-Strauss) and its challenging of redundant roles to instead cause high levels of entropy, and causing the video to differ from what would generally be expected of a more mainstream band's music videos.

The beginning of the video establishes immediately the more sombre mood of the song - a series of close-up shots of the band members' faces (as specified by Goodwin to appease an audience) reveals them to be painted like clowns. They do not, however, conform to the redundant stereotype of clowns - instead of painted smiles, their faces are painted with unhappy, unsmiling expressions; the act of turning this norm on its head from the expected to the entropic will therefore catch the view off guard, and will more greatly emphasise the sadness that is supposed to be portrayed. Similarly, where a viewer would usually associate a clown with bright colours and the carnivalesque, the lighting is instead dark, and the colours are muted as, indeed, are almost all aspects of mise-en-scene - the costumes are mostly black and white, and the settings are revealed to be shadowy and run down connoting a sense of decay to match the lyrics' depiction of a relationship in similar disrepair and decay, identifying the video as amplifying according to Goodwin's suggestions of categorisation. This initial entropy leads to a sense of unease in the viewer when they must see these unhappy, unstereotypical clowns still conform to their redundant tendencies - performing onstage, connoting falseness.

There is also a sense of pensiveness in the video caused by the use of slow-motion and symbolism; the theme of mirrors at the start of the video can be understood as being self-reflective, the personas that the band have taken on perhaps attempting to understand themselves. As the clowns falsely perform onstage, the slow motion drags the scene out, allowing the viewer more time to understand it. Slow-motion similarly used simply when the artist is pacing through the scenes lends to a feeling of entrapment, further exaggerated by the repetition of stationary shots - the one of the band all sat against a wall for example - throughout the video.

Although there is not a developed narrative plotline (the video more devoted to simply a string of performance scenarios) which means that matching it to an identified narrative theory is difficult, it can still be noted that there is an apparent change in the situation from the beginning to the end of the video. Whereas most of the video presents the entrapment of the band within a falseness and the awareness of having to put on a front, the end shows the band members wiping their faces clean and dressing back into normal, redundant clothing expected of a boy band, and so moving back into a sort of reality. Just as the lyrics seem to suggest a person who is moving on from a broken relationship, the symbolism of their rejection of the falseness and a return to a more normal scenario embodies a similar "moving on" theme, strengthened by the last shot picturing one of the clowns dropping their ball - dropping the means to his act - and walking away.

Muse - Uprising

The music video for Muse's "Uprising" is typically amplifying - as the lyrics describe a dystopian world, the video creates stereotypically dystopian setting for the video, depicting dark skies, run-down city streets and burning piles of debris, as well as featuring anarchistic themes: the running down of a lit fuse, and the inclusion of a slow motion shot of frontman Matt Bellamy breaking a shop window. The mise-en-scene is all dark - even the band are dressed in black clothes, and Bellamy is frequently downlit, casting ominous shadows across his face during his many close-ups - it is notable that the shots of the band often last a long time, and are given a much slower editing speed, conforming to the idea Goodwin pointed out of there being many close-ups of the band to appease fan viewers.

At the beginning, due to the mostly stereotypical themes, the video becomes a relatively redundant performance video. It is only the fact that the band appears to be greenscreened and placed into a toy city that lends the video any truly entropic elements, citizens replaced by plastic dolls, perhaps symbolising how the "fat cats" of the lyrics may understand the public as playthings.
Throughout the first half, the video keeps returning to shots of a teddy bear, lying face down, though apparently beginning to move,

as well as referring to other teddies during a shot of many of them on

different tv screens in an almost Big Brother style, and bringing in Goodwin's theories about voyeurism. As teddies are understood as being synonymous with childhood innocence, the audience is intended to be shocked as they are then faced with its binary opposition (Levi-Strauss): an evil-eyed, fanged and clawed giant bear, which then leads other bears into a bizarre and highly entropic teddy bear "uprising",

who then all rampage around the city, gradually destroying it, no doubt an intertexual nod (Goodwin) to Godzilla, or any other monster-movie.

Mumford & Sons - Winter Winds

Mumford & Son's video for their song "Winter Winds" can be understood as a very typical folk performance video. Its mise-en-scene typifies the style and genre: the settings are either picturesque and scenic, obviously in the countryside, or else apparently travel/live performance shots of what appears to be a festival tent, and the costume style is clearly indie/vintage - the lack of deviation from these expected norms causes it to be a highly redundant video. The only hints of entropy are vague at best, during the shots where the band run up the road, adorned with bunting, and attempt to fight against a strong wind in an almost caricatured way, an amplified representation, no doubt, of the song's title and subject, "Winter Winds". It could be that this high redundancy is to establish itself clearly as part of the folk genre to attract its maximum audience, a much smaller, niche group than a pop act, whose music, more generic by nature, would attract far more fans and so would be able to produce videos that could afford to perhaps alienate some audience members in order to be more entropic and artistically exploratory in its themes.

Indeed, the video draws parallels with folk/indie culture where it can. The rural and natural themes are emphasized by low-angle shots of a spade digging the earth, and other close-up shots of bare, muddy feet walking across a corn field, and the youth culture is targeted during the performance scenes, particularly those taking place at a festival - a key social event to their target audience - where there are shots of people drinking beer and, angling at a fan's viewpoint, incorporating shots of the audience and, indeed, people dancing in the crowd, the latter being apparently shot from within the crowd, giving the viewer a sense of association with other apparent fans.

This video, unlike the others, doesn't even have a vague narrative plot, instead being simply a series of shots which have been cut and interchanged. Neither does it have any thematic conflict, making for an easy viewing which suits the tempo of the song and the gentler style of the genre. Indeed, it seems to reject the typical aspects of a music video laid out by Goodwin - there is no sense of voyeurism or an exhibition/sexualisation of female figures. Indeed, though there are some close-up shots of the band, they are not lingering or gratuitous, and are instead seemingly replaced with more scenic shots.

Alex Day - The Time of Your Life

At a contrast to the other videos, I also explored how a minimal/no budget amateur music video would fit different classifications and theories.

To suit the indie genre, generally more eccentric in nature, the video is high

in entropy due to the strange, surreal scenario of building a robot girlfriend, the caricature

d acting and the substitution of characters for cardboard cut-outs, in this case a cutout of character Amy Pond, intertextually referencing (Goodwin) tv show Doctor Who. The video has a self-awareness that it is entropic, and plays up to its comedic elements, having a tongue-in-cheek nature; at one point Alex even lip-syncs to his own backing vocals, and two different versions of the shot override each other in split-screen to accommodate it.

Due to the amateur nature, and lack of any real budget, the mise-en-scene reflects normal day to day life, being shot in the suburbs, and the actors all wearing normal clothing, rooting reality into an otherwise surreal plotline.

Unlike the others, it does indeed have a fully distinguishable plot, which can be most easily compared to Branigan's narrative theory - the beginning of the video introduces the viewer to the characters - singer Alex and the character of the robotic new girlfriend, as well as referencing the cut-out Amy Pond in the role of an apparently ex-girlfriend. Alex initiates the events in the video by activating this new robot girl, the response forming into an odd relationship between them both. The complicating action takes place when the robot discovers the photo of Alex and Amy, and then causes her to fly into a jealous rage and, though initially calmed again, then tries to approach Amy to fight with her. Alex, in attempts to break it up, pushes the robot to the floor, where she lies still. A series of different-angled close-ups with a low editing speed review the outcome of these events. Despite the previously light nature of the video, it ends on the close-ups of the robot girl, who is unable to be revived, lending a more solemn, almost ironic end to the video.