This is our final song choice for the music video. The plot consist of the artist Plan B (Ben Drew) receiving a video tape from his ex girlfriend, who filmed herself destroying his apartment, filling it with strangers, screwing his next door neighbour and putting his cat in the oven(alternate ending show her putting a book in the oven).
A lot of the video is filmed in a p.o.v perspective, firstly from the handheld cameras night vision view, and secondly the view from Plan B himself. Because the start of the video begins at night, you know that the content of it was very recent due to night vision. What the night vision mainly does is split up the two sides of the video, Plan B’s and his ex’s, and helps distinguish which characters path is being seen. Another great factor of the effect is that it shows the ex to be a sort of bad guy, because of the colours of night vision (shades of green) and the reflections of eyes and objects, it represents her as an evil figure, which in turn emphasises what she is doing to hurt the artist. None of the video uses slow motion unlike nearly all music videos these days, instead there is a p.o.v sequence that is speeded up to show the artists movements and rush. The rest of the camera work consists of a still shot that shows Plan B, chase and status all watching the tape from on top of a TV set, it helps to provide the audience with shots of the artists reactions, and also holds way for the subtitles that are present at the foot of the screen. Another shot that is present is one that shows the artist on his way home, it’s shown by having two to three different sequences quickly edited together to firstly express pace, and second to represent the dynamics of the lyrics within the track. Shots like this are often used to help maintain a protagonists state of mind and location (see Let You Go analysis), but not edited in this way, which helps signify the piece to be its own.
The character of the ex girlfriend is shown by the actress to be extremely cunning and vindictive. As she is destroying Plan B’s flat she often glances at the camera in a provoking, evil manner which suggests what the reasoning is for her acts and what her personality was like previously. One distinctive scene where we see her dark side at its height is after and during her sex with the neighbour. As he is thrusting into her she glares at the camera lens with a deep, vicious smirk, showing how far she is willing to go to hurt him emotionally. As she walks out the bathroom where her and the neighbour had sex, she holds up a condom filled with his sperm, and upgrades the smirk to a lip biting smile, further emphasising the scenes uncomfort and her malicious revenge tactics. Both chase and status at this point react by looking away in disgust.
As with the Let You Go and End Credits video, the setting for Pieces is the streets of London and its buildings. When chase and status film a video in these locations, they always have a certain grey and brown like darkness to them, it makes it look as if it’s set in a Victorian age with modern attachments. I believe they do this to represent the areas they were from as well as many of their collaborators roots. As for the setting of the recording studio, it has typical features on ones that exist in reality and would be surprised if that was the very one they recorded the track in. The performance room is blacked out and behind a thick sheet of sound proof glass, and as the delivery man gives them the tape he has to buzz the heavy set door for entry. This helps set the tone for the video and flows nicely with the beginning of the track. The mise en scene of the flat shows in certain aspects that its owner is an artist through the clothes she ruins, and the portrait on the wall, as well as the many CD’s. The flat also looks like it covers a large area so the cost would be high.
No comments:
Post a Comment