Research for Music Video: Analysis of my preferred Music Video.

I really enjoyed watching the "Coldplay" video called "Every Teardrop is a Waterfall". I was instantly thrilled by the imagination of the music video through the creative art designs used to convey the feelings of the artists and the lyrics. The vivid colours painted, helped fuel the music video showing its vibrancy and its excitement, what music videos are meant to do and meant to make you feel. I really enjoyed watching it because it isn’t like most music videos because it has both the creativity and the imagination to make the video stand out through the camera work, through images and the swift editing.


From learning Carol Vernallis’s theory of camera work and editing, this music video is the epitome of her theory. This music video clearly defines her theory because instantly we have a handheld effect, which is done very precisely to make it look very spontaneous as if we can almost feel how they are feeling. The main singer Chris Martin is shown through jerky movements, almost jump cuts indicating his impulse movements.

Jerky movements

We have him sometimes looking directly at the camera and sometimes looking ahead of the camera which works best both ways because the look he gives to the camera – the look he gives to the audience, shows he is trying to inject these feelings to you and when he looks ahead of the camera, we feel this feeling fading away which then he injects back into us throughout the music video. I enjoyed watching how the creativity of having a continuous tracking shot where Chris Martin leaves the shot and appears again in a news stance. When the camera is fixed onto Chris Martin, when he almost hovers around the pace, I thought that was also awesome because again with the imagination and the creativity, two key words to make a music video: CREATIVITY and IMAGINATION.

Each beat is hit on each drum beat accompanied by jump cuts

The edits used are simply fantastic because there is a lot of very fast pace beats and rhythms that are accompanied accurately by the shots used through jump cuts and repetition. For example, during the solo scene with the drummer, each beat he hits on the drum matches each jump cut shot and repeated shot, and then the pace increases with each jump cuts shots accompanied by it. I really do adore the mechanics used to create this music video because it has everything you need to make an exciting music video: the creativity of images and the fast, accurate editing through the essential jump cuts, repetition and the usage of fast forwarding and rewinding. This music video has certainly inspired me to use these editing techniques when my group makes our own music video.