Sunday, October 11, 2009

Textual Analysis of a Music Video: Oren Lavie 'Her Morning Elegance'



The video above is by Oren Lavie. The song, 'Her Morning Elegance', uses Stop Motion to create a sense of movement. This is a very unconventional way of creating movement. Stop motion is created by taking thousands of still shots and changing the scene a small amount, thus producing a video when putting all of these images together. This technique is very effective in creating a kind of dreamlike feeling, which produces a better narrative using the various props used.

The Directors, Oren Lavie, Yuval & Merav Nathan, use the stop motion to bring in the audience to watch the video. The video has a weak narrative, thus using the unusual and clever technique to keep the audience interested. Furthermore, there is little variety to the camera angles used. The master shot is used for a majority of the video, which is a high angle medium shot of the bed. Apart from this shot, there are a few close ups of the woman and that is about all.

The video starts with the sun rising and shinning through the woman's bedroom window, like she is waking up from a dream. After that, the bed that she is lying on becomes the background for all of the shots, as a high angle shot is used throughout the film. As the narrative progresses, the woman starts to 'walk' in her 'dream'. This is created by taking still shots of the woman lying on he side, like she is walking normally. At this point, the man enters 'her dream', running with her side by side. The video uses pillows above the woman and man's head as clouds. These pillows change from white to grey to represent the change of mood in the narrative. Furthermore, the bed sheets change for white to black when see dives into the sea. All of props that are used in the video are from a normal bedroom. Items such as t-shirts are used as birds flying in the wind and blue bed sheets to create the sea. This idea for changing the scene is very effective as the audience can distinguish quickly that she has dived into the see thanks to her movement and the use of socks as fish.

The target audience for Oren Lavie's style of music is broad. This genre of music, a cross between pop and classical, can appeal to all age groups but is most likely to focus on the older age groups. I think that the age range for Oren Lavie would normally be between the ages of 25-40. I think that this style of music would be listened to by both male and female, but more by females as they usually prefer softer and slower music, which this is.

I believe that this video is an excellent piece of media. The use of stop motion really does set this apart from the norm of music video, involving a live performance and narrative. The problem with this video is that video is more interesting than the song. I think this is a major flaw as this video is remembered for the video, when trying to promote the song to the audience. This video has had over 7 million viewings on YouTube (11th October 2009) and most of these views are thanks to the techniques used. Looking at the past 10 comments for Lavie's song, only one person mentioned something the song, while the rest commented on the video techniques. However, after researching the artist further, i have found that this song is the most popular song on the album. On the US version of iTunes, this is easily the most popular song on the album 'The Opposite Side of the Sea'.

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