Real Media Artefact Music Promo - Redlight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFktPeFgUrQ
This music video is quite unusual; it could be seen as a concept video as it is filmed in a foreign country with a fancy dress theme running through it. This gives the audience an idea that it is Halloween, as it features many dressed up children and adults. This music video doesn’t include a narrative; instead it shows different people from the country they have filmed in. Overall, the location looks quite run down and poor however, the people in the video are shown having fun and dressing up for a parade of some kind. I like the fact that this video is quite unique, and also quite positive as this makes you want to carry on watching it.
You can tell from watching the first few seconds of this video that it has been quite heavily edited. I like the fact that the beginning sequence has jumps that fit in with the speed of the music, this is a clever technique which draws the audience in. They have also introduced the singer through the jump cuts in a subtle way, by first showing a close up of her hands, then her silhouette and a close up of her eye. I thought this was a very clever technique that I’m thinking of considering when doing my own music promo. It then goes straight from the close ups of the artists to a close up of a small girl with skeleton face paint on, I thought this was really effective as the face paint is unexpected and it shocks the audience. When the beat finally starts for the artist to start singing the music video changes from black and white to colour, this is also a clever technique that I have considered using as I like the idea of using both colour and black and white. The first words of the song are “Get out my head” at this point the camera cuts to show signs or graffiti, jumping at every individual word from one to another.  Most of this music video is made up of jump cuts, I think this is really effective as they are all in time with the music, and work really well with it. Near the end of the video they have also used different colour filters over certain scenes, which makes the video more interesting and grabs your attention.
In this video there are a lot of close ups of the individuals that live in the location where they are filming, which makes the audience more involved as you can see the peoples facial expressions clearly and you have more of an idea of what’s going on. There are a lot of people dancing in tribal outfits, I think this works well with the upbeat music as it links the idea of fancy dress with the song. Throughout the music promo there is a strong theme of god and religion, I think this is effective in the music video as it contrasts with the scary outfits and the theme of Halloween. There is a scene in the music video where the artist walks into a church and the camera follows her down the aisle, this is quite an unusual scene as you can only see the artist from behind therefore you as an audience can’t see her facial expression making it more mysterious. The camera then shows several close up shots of hanging masks that look like they have been homemade, these masks give off quite a creepy impression and this is made more dramatic by the camera slowly panning round them to add effect. This video is really unusual because there are so many different camera angles and shots used within it, I like how they have included dressed up people and then cut to normal citizens quickly after as this shows the strong contrast between the two and makes it look more dramatic. They have also made this more effective by including children and the idea of religion in the video, as these two things are normally seen as very positive but they are shown in this video alongside Halloween and the idea of horror which is could be seen as quite disturbing.