Research 10: KT Tunstall - Black Horse And The Cherry Tree (Video 8)

This video is focussed mainly on the actual music of the song, as opposed the story the song tells.
There are moments where the singer relates actions to the lyrics.. however the whole video is of KT singing the song and playing various instruments. I am interested in doing a music video in this style as I like the range of shots that are possible, and how you can play with and develop a single shot much more than you may be able to when videoing a 'movie' type music video.

 This shot was used multiple times throughout the video (whenever the lyrics were 'woohoo') it would cut to this shot. Maybe to give dramatic effect, or just because it was a nice shot they used it over and over. However, this does tie in to the style in which the video was edited; there are a lot of repeated edits, maybe not exactly the same shots, but the same type of shot (medium, close up) which are strung together in the same order, say for the chorus, or a repetitive but of the song.

 Here is  a very common shot (used earlier in my James Blunt video). It is basically a shot of the singer (or instrumentalist) playing the guitar to the song. I believe this shot is used to create an emphasis on the feel of the song, particularly acoustic songs. It is a medium to close-up shout of the body where the guitar sits and we see either both, or just the strumming hand playing the guitar. There has been a usage of lighting in this shot, where only one side of the singer is lit, no back lighting. Just a fill light. This is basically the whole video, a fill light and a few more later on, but the video is very dark, always a black background, and creates a location in itself.

 Earlier I was talking about relating the lyrics to the video. Although not told as a story, that's no reason to ignore the lyrics. In this frame we see her looking over her shoulder as she sings 'a little fear upon my back'.
It just shows the audience that there is a relationship between the singer and the song that they are listening to, and that creates a personal reaction to the mood of the song, and potentially the people seen on screen.

This is the end of a short clip used quite early on in the video. This shot actually gets closer and closer to her whilst she is banging a drum in time with the beat, until it gets to a close-up shot when it swoops up from her feet to her head, where there is a fill light shining from almost directly above her. To note here there is some visible mise en scene in the background, not easy to see what it is, but a rigid shape with a lot of angles, and shine. This gives the audience a clue as to where she is, but no conformation. This shot is supposed to emphasise the claustrophobic effect the video is trying to give.

For my final frame, I thought I would talk a little more about the editing of the video. Here we can see a faded transition between two shots; one where she is playing a guitar and has split from the centre of the screen, and the other where there is a mirror image of her singing. I'm not entirely sure of the reason for this editing, it doesn't really fit the lyrics, but was maybe just some experimenting that went on and was felt that it could be included.

The song then goes on to become even more edited, in the same sort of way as the last frame I took, at one point there is a clip of her playing the guitar, but cloned so that there are three of her doing exactly the same thing at the same time across the screen. There is also a much greater use of lighting towards the end of the video where coloured lights are used to create different effects.

This video did not seem very planned, but more along the lines of, 'ok we have a camera and some props.. lets see what we can do'. Which is not the best way of tackling a music video, but has been pulled off in this case. In my opinion, this music video would have been better if they had gone for a storyline style as opposed to purely non-locational and experimental.