Video of the Week: Your Song

This week’s video of the week is Your Song by Ellie Goulding, we chose to analyse this video as it is also from a solo female artist and so is similar to the style of music video that we aim to produce.

Overall Concept: The concept for the video is fairly basic, it is a girl who is generally happy and just enjoying the world and all its imperfections. We really liked the simplicity of this video and thought it was really effective. As our song is about going out and experiencing the world we really liked the idea of a girl just being happy doing the simplest of things that people take for advantage, such as going for walk in the country. However we did think that at times the video lacked any real storyline and so we will aim to have a little more structure to our video than this.

Camerawork: A lot of the camerawork in the video is very amateurish and this helps to create a home movie sort of vibe, which establishes a very personal feel to the video. This is enhanced by the hand held camera movement, which again creates a strong connection between the video and the audience. This camerawork also contrasts some of the more smooth shots that are used to show elements of performance. There is also a strong use of rule of thirds within the video, for example the closing shot, this creates some far more interesting views for the viewer and also allows for some creative focus pulls, which are used very effectively to add more depth to the video. We think it is really important to establish a bond between the audience and the characters in the video and really like the montage feel of the video and so hope to, in some way, replicate this effect. This will perhaps be available through an interesting use of filters. We will also try to be very aware of rule of thirds, as we really think this helps to create a far more professional tone to the video.

Mise-en-scene:

Location: The video utilises lots of outdoor locations and makes good use of nature. This helps to show that it is the simple, basic things in the world that can make you the happiest. Most of the video is filmed outdoors again emphasising the beauty of the world, in particular the shots of the river and waterfall are great shots. We really liked the outdoor locations as we thought it was very effective how simple and natural the places were. Our favourite location in the video was the waterfall as we thought this looked very poetic and summed up the beauty of the outdoors (which is what we are going for in our video) and so we will try to recreate these shots in our filming. 

Costume: The costumes within the video are very every day, simple clothing. This is yet again to symbolise that the best things are the normal things and that people take this for granted. The outfits are also very warm and cosy looking. We like the idea of the costumes being very basic however, we think it is vital for the girl in our video to stand out and so want her to look slightly out of place. This, we feel, would be beset achieved through her wearing a simple white dress.  We also liked the wellies that she wore in the video though, as this created a more enthusiastic and adventurous vibe that we think works well for our video too.

Lighting: Most of the key, eye-catching shots in the video are filmed at sunset and this creates a very dream-like, warm feeling to the video. The video is really light and bright throughout and really created a nice happy feeling to it. We loved the sunset shots and think it would be good if we had the opportunity to film any of our video at sunset.

Editing: The pace of editing is very fast and snappy, helping to create the home movie feeling of the video. The cuts are also placed on the beat helping to tie the whole video together. There are also some good uses of graphic matches between shots of the artist again helping the video to flow well. We too will aim to use these editing techniques however we may use a wider range of editing techniques as we don’t want our video to be quite as basic as this one is, we will perhaps utilise more in the way of transitions as this video was lacking on this front.

One thing we don’t think works in this video: we didn’t like how there wasn’t a clear distinction between the narrative and the performance.

One thing we love about this video: the diverse, outside locations.