JC: Technical Analysis of a music video - findings

Following my post below, I decided to analyse the music video for 'Evil' by Interpol. It features a puppet (named Norman) who, after being examined, is rushed from the scene of an accident to a hospital, who sings the lyrics the song throughout. The video was once voted the number 25 on Yahoo's Top 25 Scariest Videos.

Whilst the band are not present in the video (and indeed, did not see the puppet for the duration of the shoot), the puppet is in effect the lead singer, and the camera is predominantly focused on him - for around 90% of all shots. As we have discovered since looking at music videos, this one is effective because there are a number of cuts. This means that although the puppet is not always moving, the movement of visuals on the screen ensures we continue to watch the video (that, and the fact that a creepy puppet is singing a song), and therefore the continuous cutting of shots - on action - creates pace within a video that is fairly static. Further to this, the cutting rate increases with increased pace within the song - for example, when the drums kick in at the start of the song, there are a number of cuts in time with the beats.

I have found this process useful because it has showed me more than last year that in order to captivate an audience then there has to be both an interesting concept, and a much faster cutting rate than if you were making a film. This video for example is effective because although the shot lengths are repeated throughout the sequence, and there is little character movement, the shots are all cut on some action and in time with music.

One sequence of shots that I found particularly effective was the three consecutive zooming shots at the beginning of the song that were in time with the drum beats. As there is a section in our song similar to this, we are looking to incorporate a similar effect into our video following a group discussion.

MTV also published an intersting article about the video, giving an insight into the creative ideas that the director used to create this video - something which we could decide to replicate should our initial concept idea turn out wrong.