Genre Specific Video Analysis

As my first analysis had a more 'poppy' feel to the song, i decided to analyze a video more suitable to the genre which we are working with.

I am going to analyze My Chemical Romance's I don't love you. Although it is partially a performance song, it does have some good narrative that not only ties in with what we are doing genre-wise, but actually gives inspirations for connotations we could use in our video.

Here are some examples of good techniques used throughout the video to reflect the mood and style of the music video.

This is a scene depicting isolation; the woman is standing on her own and the scene appears unfriendly, with bare trees and leaves on the ground surrounding her. She is wearing a white dress and set against the black background, this conveys her separation from the world around her. She is looking over the horizon, seemingly searching for something.

Looking over her shoulder could convey not being able to look forwards, the person's head is still stuck in the past.

The quick cuts to the performance of the band playing give a real sense of personality to the video; as if the band are singing about something which has really happened to them.

The expression on Gerad Way's face is solemn and sombre. This is fitting to the song as he looks dismal, as his relationship has been lost. The circles under his eyes connote lack of sleep, suggestive of a turbulent time in his relationship. The close up of his face shows his anguish well, as do the contrasting colours.

The scenery here is strongly suggestive of a dead relationship; the tree is shed of its leaves and is nearly left bare. A tree in full bloom can be representative of a full and thriving relationship, thus the tree with dead leaves portrays a dedecent and lifeless relationship. Coincidently, this reminds me of a line we have used in our song choice "the dead leaves..... for they don't have trees to call their own"

This extreme close up shows a hand with what appears to be blood falling into it. Blood is a widely-used icon of guilt, therefore this represents how something horrible has gone wrong for which guilt is still felt. As the hand is an open body part, it conveys how all the wrongdoings are still blatently present and within touch.

Gerad is here looking away, as if he cannot face the relationship head on, and as if he has been dishonest in his relationship.

The mise-en-scene here looks very dismal, with the backdrop of the tree and clouds. The clouds represent how forlorn and overcast the relationship is. There are also suggestions that it will never get better, as we see no end to the clouds.

The spatial relationship appears hostile and the woman is standing away from her partner. It appears here that he is trying to give to the woman, but she is rejecting it.

This over-the-shoulder shot depicts the spatial relationship between the two. The look in her eyes conveys desperation and longing, but the fact that we cannot see the other person's face suggests the enigma of the relationship.

In this over the shoulder shot, we see the woman's headshot. She looks lost and desolate, almost as if she is looking at something in the distance. This gives the impression of an icy relationship, as do her apparently 'frosty' lips.

Here, we can see the blatant difference between the two; highlighted by the colour of the couple. One is dark and the other light, which could symbolize good and bad. Nonetheless, we see how different they are to each other through the rotating axis of the camera.

We are interested in using a number of these conventions for our video, such as

• the black and white theme will be present in some of our video to imply blandness and a loss of vitality
• the theme of a broken realtionship will be in it, so we may use similar metaphors and imagery as the director of I don't love you does
• There will be hints of spatial relationship as the relationship between the two main characters breaks up