Analysing a Music Video

 

Ed Sheeran- The A Team   

The video for Ed Sheeran’s ‘The A Team’ focuses on the story of a young girl who has turned to a life of prostitution and drugs. The video is filmed in black and white in order to give the video a gritty realism like film noir or French new wall, and tells the story of a day in the life of the girl, from waking up on a bench, to begging for money, to prostitution, to buying drugs, to going back to her unpleasant-looking, small flat.

 As this is Ed Sheeran’s debut single, the audience knows very little of about him, and his style of music and videos. As with many Indie/Acoustic artists, the name of the singer, is just his name, and is not elaborated, unlike many other genres of music, such as Rock or Rap. Ed Sheeran does not actually feature in the video, and the main character is a young girl, and we see in the video, what she goes through in an average day; from what the audience can tell from the greyscale filming, the girl is wearing a hooded top and jeans, her hair is long and lank and she has large black eyes. This definitely suits the genre of the video, as she looks unkempt and drugged-up, which adds to the effect of the video and how it portrays this lifestyle stereotypically.

  The genre of the video is a narrative of the girl’s life, and tells the story of one of her days. The music style is Indie/Acoustic, because the only audible instrument is an acoustic guitar, and the style of music is Indie. Indie music is a rapidly growing part of today’s popular music scene, and there are more Indie artists today than ever before. This is partly why I chose Ben Mitchell to focus on as my project, because he plays the guitar himself, and is a self-typed Indie/Acoustic artist. Therefore, I feel he will appeal greatly to my target audience of young people and teenagers.

 In the video, the editing and cutting is very slow, to tie in with the slow pace of the music, and perhaps the slow, groggy feeling of the girl in the video’s unfulfilling life. The cutting and camera work are edited in time to the music, to each time the scene changes on a beat, more emphasis is added than if the shot changed without the correlating music.

 The lyrics of the song explain her story; how her life is going downhill. The lyrics tie in with the music video greatly, as they describe her activities within the video. For example, one line says “go mad for a couple grams” referring to her drug addiction, which is backed up when the girl buys and then takes drugs. Another lyric relating to the video is “sell love to another man” which is referring to her being a prostitute. I think that this video is trying to relate to the younger generation,

  The setting of this video, from what you can assume, is a city. She starts off in a park, then travels into the city in order to beg and ‘Sell love to another man’ as the lyrics state. The scenes are very naturalistic, with just everyday, commonplace props, which add to the realism of the video. In fact, it could be classed as a fly-on-the-wall documentary of this girl’s life. The black and white of the video suggests a very basic type of video, linking again with her very basic, unsatisfactory life.