The Drums, Lets go surfing - Video analysis

The video I am analyzing is Lets go surfing by The Drums, the videos genre is rock/indie whicis perfect for the genre that we are aiming for, this is pretty obviously shown to us by

the bands clothing, of tight jeans, short tight tops, indie style thrown back hair cuts and of course when the band actually start to play their instruments, of drums and the guitar.

In terms of their being an actual connection between lyrics and visuals in the song, there is only a couple of lines that actually work with each other. One for example, "honey, take a run down to the beach", the band members are running along the seafront on the beach. Also the line "i'll never let you go" this line is used frequently in the video, and is also played when the band members eventually drop off, one by one. There is a slight lyrics to visuals, in the lines "down, down baby down by the roller-coaster, sweet sweet baby i'll never let you go." These lines are repeated four times, and on the last repeat, the back two of the band stay, while the other two run off. But apart from these three examples the video has no lyric to visuals connections, I can understand the music director trying to achieve fluidity through out the video, but I think some clever lyrics to visuals links would work very well in this video. The line "there's a new kid in the town", they could have reunited with their band members.

In the video there are no shots or links to instruments and the music, there are shots of the guitars and the drums, but no real close ups of one of the instruments. In terms of the video cutting to the beat, the video has no cuts! It is one long sequence of film, the song is quite slow and dreary so in a way this type of filming does work very well with the video.

The main objective of course for any music video is to sell the track and the band involved. But in this video there isn't any close ups of the band, the video is shot all from a medium close up but showing below the waist as well, it is a stationery camera that films the band, but it is probably being drove along by a car/truck. Looking back at other videos from the The Drums, for example Best Friend and Forever and Ever, they do like the feel and the look of not so much a stationery camera but when the band is walking towards the camera, and they let the artists do their own thing, this is clearly seen in the video "Best Friend", where the camera is stationery and the band do their own thing. This type of filming does a give sense of freedom to the video, and i actually quite like how it is filmed.

- Lets go surfing Best Friend -

The video is mainly narrative based, but there are definitely parts of the video where there is a small performance for 20 seconds roughly. However the video still keeps to its traditional camera shot even for the performance part, you would think they would do close ups of guitars and drums but they don't in this case, I guess they want to keep that stationery feel through out the video.

To sum up this interesting video, I think the way the director has portrayed the band is very interesting there are no close ups of the band members and the instruments, hes just letting the music sell it self which I really like, obviously the way the video is shot on a beach ties in well with the song "Lets go surfing". I do actually quite like the way it has been filmed with the band members filmed using one shot all the way through, me and my group may consider this when it comes to filming our video.