Switchblade Smiles - Kasabian

I chose to analyse this music video because I feel it holds many conventions of a rock music video. The first 20 seconds presents a zooming camera movement towards the band, before panning over the top of them. This establishes the band themselves, their setup, and who is playing the instruments.

After 40 seconds of the video we see the first example of how the music drives the editing. At each beat, a band member snaps his eyes open, and the camera cuts quickly to each member of the band in time with the music.

After this sequence, the visuals immediately portray the sounds we can hear, as the scream starts and we see one of the band members performing the scream. His body language presents struggle and therefore a deeper meaning to the scream in the song.

After this, we begin to hear the drums and the camera cuts to a close up of the drums being played. The camera cuts back again for another scream, and as soon as the guitar begins to play, the rapid cuts and close ups begin. The jolting movement of the band members along with the shaky camera relfect the sounds we can hear.

As lyrics are sung, we see a close up of the lead singer, but as the camera pans around him we can also see the other band members playing their instruments in the background.

At 1:45 in the video, the pace of the song slows down, and slow motion shots of the band members slamming their instruments around are shown to reflect the change in music. The chorus is not the fastest part of the song, so camera movement is slow and pans around the band. However, close ups of the lead singer are still present to establish them.

At the song bridge, at every beat, red is flushed across the scene so that you can only roughly see the black outlines of the band members. This is the only special effect really used in the entire video, mainly because of the simplicity of the setting. Much like 'Can't Stop' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, it is filmed in a white open space.

At 3:10 in the video, the rapid drum beats drive the editing and a huge amount of quick cuts occur. Some scenes you see within the cuts were part of the earlier visuals and the set appears to go back to the beginning of the song. As the music drops, one band member appears to headbutt the camera and frantic movements of the band begin again at the chorus.

The idea of a struggle is presented throughout the video, despite it being solely a performance video. This can have some metaphorical meaning related to the lyrics. At the end of the song, the struggle is over, with a slow shot depicting the broken instruments and set they were playing on.

One video I found related to the music video was the 'Making of Switchblade Smiles'.

It is a small behind the scenes film but gives a good idea of the amount of preparation required to make the music video. The team on the set of the video is very large and they do not shoot the video all in one go. The video is broken up into smaller sections with the director often intervening to give more instructions. The video also shows how the camera is used in the video in order to get smooth takes. We will have to use a handheld camera to shoot our video, which will make this much more difficult.