RESEARCH: Music Video Analysis

                             Main Artist (Giggs)            Featured Artist (Example)                    Actor
This music video has it all. It promotes the artist, the featured artist and also the actor who is portraying the artist. The video consists of not just promoting themselves, but giving extra meaning towards to lyrics and showing the audience what their perception of the lyrics is.

I feel that music video Look Over Your Shoulder is a great example of a music video. This is due to the various pieces of criteria they have in the video with work great with the song and amplify the lyrics.

Instead of just having "a video" which the artist is part of, the music video itself gives a sense of meaning to the lyrics as well as doing what a music video is out there to do; promote the artists. The video starts off with an actor who is portraying the main artist (Giggs). There is manual focus involved here as the camera adjusts to the reflection of a man in the mirror in a mere colourless shot (much like a horror film). The mise en scene here shows what type of story or meaning they are trying to imply to the audience with no lyrics even mentioned yet. Like many other music videos, the camera is not static. The way it is filmed is trying to impose that this is a story that the artist is telling to camera, with the camera being us as the audience. When the actor is always on screen, he never looks at the camera as he is showing what the lyrics of the song are in a physical story-form.

The artists on the other hand do give eye-contact with the camera, but only depending on what they are portraying in the music video. This is because in the video, while the lyrics are telling a story, they show the story too (illustration). Here the artists become part of and illustrate the story along with the actor in which these parts they don't look at the camera. The other parts of the video in which they are instead telling not showing the story is when they do look at the camera as the artist themselves.

There are plenty of base tracks used in the video. Each base track is shown directly after a shot of the actor illustrating the story of the lyrics. Example:
BASE TRACK ----> STORY ----> BASE TRACK ----> STORY ----> BASE TRACK etc....
This tells the audience that the images of the actor is really a story of the artist, just being illustrated by someone else. The camera shots vary in the video. While showing the artists in one base track shot in a 360 degree rotating angle, there is another base track shot static in a hallway where the artists just sing to the camera. I like variation here as it brings something difficult to the music video as all other music videos are similar and use the same styles of recording. The camera however is never static while showing the actor. As the song is called "Look Over Your Shoulder", there are a lot of over the shoulder shots to amplify what the lyrics are saying. It goes with the concept of what they lyrics are trying to imply. There are many different camera angles used in the illustration shots; birds eye view, point of view, over the shoulder, close ups; every type of shot possible is used. The transitions are all kept to the same level of consistency which brings realism into the video.