Planning for Music Video: Analysis of original video for song choice

This is the video for Guilt by Nero. In the video it seems to be set in a strip club or brothel, with the pole dancer being the main focus in the music video, with the vocalist Alana appearing in the video subtly, and more attention is paid towards the stylised editing and the background. This is possibly because Nero are a dubstep genre, and with most dubstep artists, for example Chase and Status, don't feature in their video unless doing a cameo appearance. Now to analyse!

THE BEGINNING
At the beginning, there is a very high angle shot of the buildings with 'NERO' on a billboard. I can't quite tell if it is a cartoon or real life but it appears quite animated, as if its a dream, imagination or memory. Also, when the camera swoops down to reveal the location, you see the word 'GUILT' in front of the building, which is a clever trick to embed the song and artist in your head.

LIGHTING AND MISE EN SCENE.
In the video, the lighting is quite dark as it is set at night. but it is brightened up by the strobe lights in the background, which really help to set the scene. I've noticed the lights have a red tone to it, which could possibly connote lust or evil or both of them. This is quite interesting because the pole dancer in the video is quite a taboo subject; because of this it is age-restricted on Youtube. They have put quite a lot of emphasis onto the strobe lighting, it is like a repeated motif throughout the song.

CHARACTERS
The main character in the video is the pole dancer who takes up most of the camera time with her amazing performances and tricks, which is quite an interesting thing to put in the video, as the lyrics specifically talk about guilt, and I don't see the connection with that, which makes this video a disjuncture. If you look at my past blogs, I have explained the different types of videos structure, but to recap your memory, a disjuncture is when their is little or no relationship between the video and the lyrics, or the lyrics contradict the video. We will take some aspects into this in our video. The singer in the video isn't shown that much, CU's and ECU's of her face and facial body parts are shown sometimes, which does signal her as the singer but doesn't really make her the main attraction in the video.

EDITING
The editing with this video has two main aspects. The first is I noticed they use have an extensive use of a cross fade or cross dissolve, so most of the clips merge into one another so its a clean smooth transition, which in turn makes it look professional and well made. Another is they slow down the speed of the clips and make the pole dancers legs look longer, so it looks quite futuristic and modern.

Until then!

Stephanie