Analysing videos from other artists...

Evanescence - Everybody's Fool 

This video is much more serious than the Blink 182 one and this could be to do with the fact that it is categorised under a different genre – Evanescence are more ‘rock’ sounding – but Paramore have links to both genres because their music fuses the two.

There is purely narrative in this video and no performance footage which is something I didn’t see in any of the pop/punk videos but the lead singer Amy does lip sync most of the way through.

The story is of a woman who is putting on an act that she has a perfect life and everyone falls for it but behind closed doors she’s an absolute mess and hates herself. The whole video strongly links to the lyrics as Amy sings ‘no flaws when you’re pretending’ and she plays all of the characters seen – an actress for the brand ‘lies’ and the actual girl behind the act that is really unhappy.

She sings ‘without the mask, where will you hide? Can’t find yourself lost in your lies’. I think people will relate to people because so many people act like their okay when they’re not.

When doing the modelling shoot and adverts, the character wears formal, glamorous clothes but when she is left to be herself she wears a strap top and tracksuit bottoms and this is really showing the two sides of the person. I think it would be good to wear more than one outfit in my own music video.

The lighting is really dark and this is appropriate for the context of the video. I think the editing is more complex than all of the pop/punk videos I looked at. There are extra bits added to the video post-production. An example of this is when Amy is on the motorbike and the bold writing and the can comes on the screen. There is also cross-cutting between the two sides of the girl’s personality; the part where she is at home crying and the scenes where she is doing photo shoots and TV adverts – this keeps the video interesting because it’s varied. The video seems to be more thought out in this genre.

Camerawork is kept quite simple but it’s still effective because the story behind it is sad, the camerawork doesn’t need to be extravagant because it would take away from the story that affects the audience. However the camera does use lots of high angle shots to show the vulnerability of the character.   

The music video uses dark lighting and varied camera shots along with a really sad narrative to portray the anger and depression felt in the lyrics.