Hey Everyone! For this weeks reflective response, I'll be sharing with you a video I found pretty interesting and unique. It is a music video for the song, "Breezeblocks" by the band Alt-J. I highly suggest you watch the video first before continuing on reading.
Anyways, I thought it was a pretty intriguing music video, and I hoped you liked it too. You could probably tell, the whole music video was in reverse. I think the term for this in cinematography is 'reverse motion'. It's when the action in the video is played backwards, which when used correctly, can add lots of suspense and anticipation. I think this video is a great example of just that. You start off with a shot of the dead lady in the bathtub, and as the video progresses, it reveals what actually happened. Reverse motion caused me to make assumptions that I found out at the end of the video, weren't true. Initially, I thought the man was brutally attacking the woman, but I found out that it was actually self defense. I thought this because that's how it plotted out. It showed the woman running away from the man, and she looked scared. But then, we actually realize that the woman attacked him first. I think this video was really structured well, in a way that added that twist in the end. The composition of shots really helps tell the story. For example, they strategically used close-ups, to show emotion, but to also set up the story. There were close-ups of faces, like of the woman in the cupboard who you could distinctly tell was upset and afraid. But there were also close-ups of hands. There was a shot of the lady in the tub, and a shot of the man's hands, and a shot of the woman's (who was in the cupboard) hand. What I took away from this was that the man and the kidnapped woman, were married, because there were several shots of their rings. However, the dead lady did not have a ring on. There were lots of shots of the man's ring, which means the director really wanted that to be clear. Also, if you were wondering what "breezeblocks" meant, it's basically the British way of saying "cinderblock". The breezeblock was what was used to kill the woman. I really liked the shot of the glass bottles breaking. It really looked cool seeing all the shards get put back together. Not only was it compelling of them to use reverse motion, but I did like the fact that they slowed it down. If it wasn't slowed down, it would be hard to tell what was going on, and it wouldn't convey much emotion. Slowed down, you can really feel the mood on the actors faces, especially at 1:24. I thought the actors did a very nice job in getting emotion across. My favorite shot overall though, would have to be the last shot. It's a really nice silhouette of the man 'leaving' his apartment. The keys and the light switch really help too. I do enjoy how the light switch turning off is synced to the beat. If you're interested in seeing the reversed version of this, you can watch it by clicking here. Well, that is it for this week's reflective response! Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed! Bye!
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