Jeanette In Class Assignments #2 Film Techniques

"The Killing Type" (music video) by Amanda Palmer

I find this video to be almost a study in film techniques. First off, color is a huge control factor. The set is bright white, without noticeable boundaries. All members of the band are also dressed in white, and the instruments are...wait for it...white. This makes the introduction of color midway through the video quite striking. As the singer sings about violent impulses toward her lover, she strikes his sleeping body as he sleeps, but spreads red paint/blood that comes from her over him and over herself. By the end of the video, her entire body is dripping red and there is red splattered all over the set. Then, in the last few seconds, an instantaneous transformation occurs and the set is clean and stark white again, with the singer holding only a pumping heart in her hand.

Throughout the video, the contrast of the video is kept very high, which emphasizes the color contrasts. Most of the focus is kept very shallow, with a focus on the singer's face and, when she is over her lover's body, a focus on her instead of him. 

"Hide and Seek" (music video) by Imogen Heap

This video is unique in that it is one long, continuous shot. It is effective for such a long time, even though the action is fairly stagnant (just one woman singing to the camera the entire time), because the shot is so dramatic. The balance of light and dark is extreme--the shot as a whole is very dark, nearly black toward the edge of the frame and getting lighter, but not significantly, toward the center of the frame. In contrast, there is a bright spotlight on the singer's face. The contrast is also set very high, so that the singer's dark hair (which is being continuously blown by wind offstage) connects her visually with the outer edges of the frame because her hair reads simply as "dark" and her skin as "light" because of the contrast settings. This is all given an additional ethereal cast (which complements the somewhat surreal lyrics) as the focus of the camera shifts in and out of deep and shallow settings.

(Just because it's been a long time since we had this conversation: I missed this class, and you said for me to apply some discussion of film techniques to a couple of movies. I chose music videos because they are complete and concise.)