Currently in the charts, Ed Sheeran's A Team is a mainly acoustic song. This video is completely storyline based, with no visual instrumental or voice connection to the music. It is also shot entirely in greyscale, adding to the sombre mood the story tells.
On of the opening shots, this is more locational than anything. I like the way the exposure has been set to make the sky a pure white, with everything on the ground (trees etc) dark grey, rather than also being whited out, there is a nice contrast. Evidently from what we can see from the actor is that she had slept rough that night and woke up on a park bench, a low angle has been used to make everything tall look even more so. This makes her look even more vulnerable and gives the audience an emotional connection to her.
Here is a tracking shot where we are following the girl along the road. I think the point trying to be made here was that she had no transport and nowhere to go but walk through the town. (her being dressed in a duvet led me to this conclusion). A weird effect has been applied to this shot, where there seems to be a slight radial zoom towards the centre of the screen, whether this is just the lens or setup used I am not sure, but it makes everything look a lot further away.
Here we see her looking up the whited out sky, through some kind of wire circle. The black and white of this shot works very well with the urban feel of the video. The main reason for taking this shot I believe is to allow the audience to relate to the character. As you can see she is looking upwards, and so is the camera from below her. It is almost a point of view shot, although 3rd party. It allows us to see what she is looking at, as well as being able to see her body language and emotion towards it.
The reason I chose to take this shot is mainly because of the depth of field and how it makes the audience focus more in the emotion of her face than what is going on in the background. This shot is used in films excessively as well as in photography, as you can see, the screenshot itself makes for quite a nice photograph. I will definitely be looking to make use of this type of shot in my own music video, it takes practice to get right first time, but is worth the effort for the effect you get.
This shot is part of a 'time lapse' section of the video. We see her sitting there for at least half an hour of filming, where a stream of photos has been put together and sped up to an appropriate fps, making it look like everyone is rushing past as she is just sitting there. This technique would be nice to include in my music video, it can be genre specific, but if done in the correct way can work with pretty much any song.
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