Friday, 4 July 2014

Analysis Of Indie/Singer-Songwriter Music Videos #3 : Keep You Head Up by Ben Howard


Song : Keep Your Head Up
Artist : Ben Howard
Director : sfsf


Genre Characteristics:
The video is all about 3 people building a slide out of hay and black plastic bin liners. We see the scenery of the setting they have filmed the video. The start of the video portrays the end of the video.



What is the relationship between lyrics and visuals? :
Some key lyrics are presented through visual such as ‘Darkness’ is seen in dark woods, ‘skin’ shows the feet in the water. When the lyric drags a ‘no’ to ‘no, no no’, the visuals drags the shot longer. When he sings ‘keep your head up’ in the last verse and chorus, the 3 friends have kept their heads up in the slide.


What is the relationship between music and visuals? :
After each different chord or string plucked, the shot changes. When the music fastens, the visuals fastens. When the music becomes slow, the shots that are used are slow cuts and the shots are kept for a longer time.


Are there close-ups of the artist and star image motifs:
There is close-ups of the artist when he sings ‘me’ and the first verse and chorus is mostly him until he sings ‘friends’ where 2 of his ‘supposed’ friends comes in. So key lyrics used.



Is there reference to the notion of looking? :
There isn’t a reference to notion of looking because the video is mainly looking at the people themselves and what they are doing rather than the artist looking at the camera and singing. There may be one possible reference where he stars at his feet when he sings ‘skin’ but apart from that there is nothing else that you see.





Are there intertextual references? :
There are no intertextual references as it is not something that uses other media reference in it, it is just a small ‘project’



Is it performance-based, narrative-based, concept-based? How much for each?

It is narrative based as it is telling a story of his friends and him making a slide and sliding down it until the end where they jump into a river.

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