Every now and again we deconstruct films, short and documentaries with our students. Today we’re going to deconstruct a widely popular Bjork YouTube video. The purpose of deconstructing films and music videos helps you identify three incredibly important things.
1. It exposes story structure
2. It exposes the technical attributes to the film / video
3. It exposes compositional elements to the film / video
Today we have deconstructed the Bjork music video entitled “All is Full of Love”. It was directed by music video director genius Chris Cunningham. We hope you find our music video deconstruction helpful. The video can be viewed below:
Below, we’ve outlined how we’ve deconstructed the video. We’ve counted locations, scenes (i.e. edit points), we’ve identified the color palette, the length of each shot and the compositional attributes to each scene (i.e. whether the shot was a close up, medium shot or B-roll). It should be noted that some numbers needed to be estimated or rounded for simplicities sake. However, we’ve tried to make the numbers as accurate as possible. Enjoy!
Number of Shots:
There are a total of 60 edits points. The entire video is made up of 60 clips fitting within 4 minutes and 10 seconds.
Camera movement:
8 of 60 shots (roughly 13%) of shots are moving. The remainder (roughly 87% of shots are static).
Color palette:
There is a strong color palette composed of blues, whites and blacks with small highlights of oranges and reds.
Number of locations:
There is only 1 location with camera coverage from different angles
Length of each shot:
The shot length ranged from less than 1 second in length to 24 seconds. There were only 6 scenes that were over 10 seconds long (roughly 10%) and only 4 shots over 20 seconds in length (roughly 6%).
1 second in length: 20 shots (33%)
2 seconds in length: 14 shots (23%)
3 seconds in length: 8 shots (13%)
4 seconds in length: 3 shots (5%)
5 seconds in length: 4 shots (6%)
7 seconds in length: 1 shot (2%)
10 seconds in length: 6 shots (10%)
20 seconds in length: 4 shots (6%)
Composition of shots:
This music video uses great pacing and editing. The composition of shots is normal for a music video. Many interesting and artistic cutaway shots were used. We refer to these shots as “b-roll”. This includes shots of the equipment moving, the liquid hitting the floor etc. Most of the “b-roll” in this video is of the robotic equipment moving and really showcased depth, lighting, texture and movement.
8 close ups: (13%)
18 medium shots: (30%)
8 wide shots: (13%)
26 B-roll shots (mostly close ups / abstract etc): (43%)
We hope you find this exercise in deconstruction helpful. As filmmakers it’s rewarding to watch the works of your favorite directors, DOP’s (Director of Photography) and editors to see how they design and structure their films and videos. It’s a time consuming exercise but you’ll learn a lot from the experience.
Best of luck on your future music video projects!
Popularity: 7% [?]
