Analysis of Music Videos: Inspiration

Thirty Seconds to Mars - Up in the Air (2013)

This is the music video that has inspired us the most for our own music video. I personally love the high quality shots of interesting people and animals, as well as the colourfulness of the costumes and props, because these all help to keep the audience engaged throughout the whole 8 minutes of the video. The range of amazing things used in the video, eg. the zebras, show off how much the band actually have to spend on the video, and gives the band an image of being popular and successful. Obviously we won't have this kind of budget, so we will have to think of different props and costumes that we can use to show a different kind of image for our band. The band appear throughout the video, which helps the audience associate this music with the band, so we will use this technique in our video to help link our band with our chosen song. I think the slow motion is a great technique to use because it makes it look very professional (if done right!) therefore making the band look better. Synchronous cuts have been used to match the music at certain points, for example when the music gets faster there are lots of short clips with very fast cuts to match the building up of the song, and when the song slows down/stops there is a slow motion shot of a gymnast in the air, which fits perfectly with the song. Finally, the video is purposefully very colourful because the album they have just released with this song on is very colourful (the cover is just lots of different coloured spots) so this helps give the fans something to associate the music video with the band. 

You Me At Six - Lived A Lie (2013)

We have also taken ideas from this video by You Me at Six. There are lots of close ups of the band performing, and I like the idea of having the extreme close ups of the eyes because I think that looks very artistic. I also like the close ups of the singers lips as he is singing, and as long as we match the lip syncing up perfectly with the song, I think this would be a good thing to have in our music video. Again, like the 30 Seconds To Mars video, there are synchronous cuts, so as the song gets faster and more instruments join in, the cuts get quicker and at one point the shots change on every beat of the song. The band are all wearing similar clothes, and they are all black/grey which matches the night time setting and dark, gritty location they have filmed in which gives the band an image of a dark rock type band. When the song says "We are believers" the band are all walking in a line with straight faces looking down the camera, like they are marching, which matches the marching band in the song, so they have thought about matching the lyrics to the video and I think we should have a look at the lyrics of the song we are going to use and think of things we can include so that the video matches with the song.