The video starts with very dark lighting, a spotlight from the top right corner (unseen) highlights Florence’s face composed in the bottom left of the screen. The light highlights her signature motif bright red hair. As the camera zooms out from an extreme close-up to a medium shot of Florence, the lighting shows her face brighter making her appear beautiful/angelic. We can see her in a glittering costume with almost theatrical looking makeup. There is an obvious relationship between the lyrics and visuals, as she sings “Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air” and raises her hand to the light.
As the music fades to reach a dramatic crescendo the lighting abruptly fades out to blackness to mimic the dramatic change in the music. Once again we see the outline of Florence highlighted by a small spotlight that focuses on the motif of her bright red hair.
As the music reaches the chorus, Florence appears on a large glittering moon making her seem glamorous and dazzling with the high lighting. The mise – en – scene becomes the audience's main focus but also still keeps our attention on the main singer Florence.
The lighting now looks very blue and spotlights are used behind to appear like stars. Florence uses her body to create a strange pose to draw the audience’s attention - also linking in with the voyeuristic treatment of the female body, that she is simply an object to be looked at.
The camera shot changes position from facing Florence as a medium long shot, to a medium close-up from the side at a low angle so she appears slightly above us signifying her. Her movements appear very sexual and this tells us a lot about Florence as a singer and how she wants to portray herself to her fans and viewers of the video – she wants them to see her as a woman who is very sure of sexuality and confident with her body (exhibited by her skimpy costume).
One of the best aspects of this music video is the lighting. This is used very prominently to add colour and create special effects and compositions that could not be achieved any other way. The light is always focused on or appears to be coming from within Florence – maybe a metaphor?
She always seems to be addressing the light – suggesting many different ideas to what it could symbolize (God, a lover, the sun etc), which is left to the audience to decide who Florence is singing to.
Florence not only uses her body in a sexual way but also in quite a ferocious/exaggerated way. She makes a lot of fierce “head-banging” and sweeping motions which are shown close-up to capture the action (in match-on-action shots) and to give the video a fast pace to fit with the pace of the music at this point.
Florence’s passionate and vigorous movements not only work with the pace of the music but they emphasise the lyrics which are explicitly about love.
The shots then change dramatically as we see a lot of long shots that show the moon turning surrounded by smoke (mimicking clouds in the sky) as Florence leans back looking quite “fairy-like” as she sweeps her hand through the smoke – quite similar to Dreamworks.
Florence then continues to use her hair and body to create excitement on the screen. She changes her position in the composition of the shots we see, making it feel as if there is a lot going on – when in reality she is just moving about a bit. A match-on-action shot is used to make her “head-banging” seem more exciting and showing it from different angles makes it look quite jerky and dynamic.
Within this music video there appear to be many references to other music videos and even films. As the lighting in the film becomes a lot brighter and we see a sudden use of transitions used to overlay shots they create a very postmodern looking music video. Whilst being post-modern looking it also looks very “Kate Bush-Wuthering Heights” with the use of smoke and very feminine/flailing arms etc.
However I also think the use of the shadowy hand against the white could refer to horror films such as Psycho and Scream – taken from many shower murder scenes.
We then see Florence shown sat on the bottom of the moon with her legs dangling over the edge as thousands of silver balloons fly up past her – with which the camera lowers the angle and Florence’s eye line follows the balloons making the audience do so too. In the back there is a small blue spotlight just seen (also used earlier to create the blue effect) it is now focused down on the smoke to give it a turquoise almost sea-like effect (Little Mermaid-esque?)
No comments:
Post a Comment