Video Analysis

Looking at the two videos that have already been realised by Ellie Goulding gives me a limited choice as she is a fairly new artist and only has a few videos realised. I have decided to look at ‘Guns and Horses’ and ‘The Writer’ and analysis these examining the key concepts in media –

• Genre
• Representation
• Narrative
• Audience
• And how the video communicates some sort of meaning

Firstly, I looked at ‘The Writer’ a song which http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ru2glqXAg


The genre of this song is electro pop and the video is shown in a romantic and quite magical way. Parts of this video represent this genre with such areas the mysterious look from parts of this video, here are some screen grabs I have gathered to show this –




The lyrics to this song are about love, looking into the lyrics of this song I found this quote by Ellie Goulding herself on the Wikipedia website.

"The Writer" is the most personal and emotional song I've written yet. It's about how you'd do anything and change absolutely everything about yourself if necessary, just to be noticed by this one person."
—Ellie Goulding, Sky Songs

This video communicates the idea that she is alone, with her being in this vast expanse of land with no one there but herself it is quite a lonely kind of video, it suggests that however hard she tries it doesn't seem to work. This would, in real life, make you feel as though you are all alone and no matter what you try to do you still feel alone. That no one understands how you are feeling and you can't share those feelings with anyone. The lyrics match up to this idea that she is trying so hard but it doesn't seem to be working.

This relates back to the idea of pop as most pop music videos and lyrics are about love, break ups and relationships in general, involving the good and bad. This quote above shows that these lyrics are in this pop category as they are about someone she wants to be with but he doesn’t even notice her. However most areas of this music video are shot in a rural vicinity that are not related to this genre proving that not all videos need to represent the genre they are in. This shows that the video making industry is being able to broaden the appearance of their videos with other aspects that are not usually related to the electro pop scene. Here are some screen grabs to show this.

When researching into the audience that have viewed this video on YouTube, we are told that the audience are females age 13 to 24 and males aged 18-24. This indicates the same target audience in general as 'I'll Hold My Breath', this means that Ellie Goulding has a strong target fan base that are not just interested in the one song.

This also shows that Ellie Goulding is most popular in the United Kingdom and other areas surrounding us such as USA and Europe. This is another aspect that is the same as the song choice my group and I have chosen.

My second choice of song is another by Ellie Goulding called 'Guns and Horses' -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDwbHeR0UYc&ob=av2n

This video is another video where it is set outside, this time n a woods with people dressed in solider outfits who are dancing in the background and lots of cross cutting shots of a horse in a misty setting. Which captures the title of this song. This video, with the dancers in the background links back to the genre of this music video which is, again, electro pop. The use of dancers is used a lot in pop videos with this being no exception to the rule. We can see that this is a lot like the sort of thing that we see in such videos recently like Cheryl Cole with 'Fight For This Love'. This shows that this is a popular idea at the moment and is some what in fashion for the music video industry. Dancers have been used throughout the music video creation with Michael Jackson's video 'Thriller'.

As I found a quote from Ellie Goulding on Wikipedia for the previous song I looked again for this one. This is what she had to say about what this song is about.

"I wrote "Guns And Horses" about a romance that began online hence the lyric 'you found me, at a screen you sit at permanently'. I wanted the guy to feel more than he did for me but through no fault of his own he couldn't. It's a song about frustration essentially."

The lyrics of this song relate to this but I don't think that the music video has a lot to do with the song at all. Obviously it has a lot to do with the title, but the title doesn't have a lot to do with the emotion and the true point of the song. I feel that music videos are doing this a lot more in the past decade. Music videos use to be a lot about explaining the lyrics through image as well, the video would be telling the story of the lyrics. Now, it is a lot more about the image of the artist and not a lot to do with the song lyrics. There are a few images in this video that do relate to the normality's of the pop genre though. This image shows the bright lights,with trees around, flowers below her whilst she is spinning around. Disorientation in music videos is used quite a lot in pop to show the confusion and emotions through image that pop music expresses.

Just like the video before however, a lot of this is not conforming to the electro pop music video stereotype. Firstly, it is set in a woods which is a very natural environment for this type of music to be set. Usually it is set in a studio or somewhere more technical, with unnatural lighting. Here it is shown to be natural, even if it is edited in the final stages of production. This means that both her videos are not directly shown as the stereptypical music video and this would give the impression that she is quite quirky and not a 'cheesy pop' artist. This will most likely mean that she appeals to a wider audience as she is adding aspects of different genres into her music video.

Looking into the target audience for this music video on YouTube with its 1,384,073 views on her official video alone, the target audience is shown to be females 13-24 and males 18-24. Again, this links in with 'I'll Hold My Breath' and 'The Writer' beacuse the YouTube target audience for 'The Writer' and this song are the same. We know that the song 'I'll Hold My Breath' has a fan base of men and women as she is shown in men's magazines and YouTube shows that women like her too.

We can also see that the target audience is in England, as Ellie Goulding is an English artist this makes a lot of sense. She is also well known in the USA which is really good for an English artist to be able to break into America. Europe are also part of her fan base.