Black Eyed Peas Music Video

Meet Me Halfway – Black Eyed Peas.

The third video that I am going to analysis is the video Meet Me Halfway by the Black Eyed Peas. This video has a massive amount of editing and visual techniques to please the audience and keep them interested in the video. to help me create a full analysis of the video are a number of questions that will enable me create a thorough investigation into the visual and narrative aspects of the video

First of all, effects.

This video has a massive range of special effects and editing techniques to wow their audience. Right from the word go there is a range of special effects, the first of which we see one of the band members Alp spinning in mid air whilst singing. After we witness Will.i.am is riding an elephant in space, which is a very unusual scene. The visual aspects of the video are very different to any other video this band has created, as Will.i.am quoted, ‘this video is very different in the fact that it is the most arty video we have created’. We do tend to see a lot of colours in the video, making the video bright and vibrant. The space setting makes the video very original and keeps the audience entertained. The one part of the video that stood out for me was the four shooting stars that crossed the sky, above the road that was shown at the beginning of the video.

The narrative I found was very hard to understand as it was not clear in the video and the lyrics did not match the video very well in the sense that the lyrics did not reflect what was happening in the video. The lyrics in themselves did not explain the narrative of the story which made it difficult to understand what it was about. The lyrics told a different story to the video which is what made it frustrating.

The live performance of the music video is very good, as we see the artists but a lot of effort into the characters they have to play, there is a lot of emotion in the video and the band members portray it well. The general story is portrayed through the artists live performance mainly, instead of the lyrics. Although the general idea of the music video is hard to understand certain objects enable you to pick them out which leads me onto my next point, mise-en-scene.

The mise-en-scene is a very good choice for this music video. As with the video’s genre, the items of clothing that they wear are very different to any other performance that they have created. The style of clothing switches back and forth, form old rags at the beginning to futuristic clothing at near the middle. The music uses a number of original settings which attracts the viewers attention and makes the video more enjoyable to watch. The video is also uses a number of editing techniques such as cross cutting, which helps us to understand the relationship between shots, jump cut, moving from one shot in the music video to another and long shot, this helps us to witness the type and style of clothing that the band members are wearing. Also, close up is a shot that is used a lot to show various emotions.

The success of the video is highlighted by the fact that it has a record breaking number of views in YouTube (33,107,379 million views!). I do think that the video has been a massive success, mainly because of the unique setting and items of mise-en-scene. This video also was a chart topping sensation, topping charts in Australia, Belgium, Germany, Romania, a variety of charts in the UK and USA. I think the target audience for this video is sci-fi viewers as there seems to be a lot of space age settings and the mise-en-scene seems to be very space orientated.

This video links in very nicely to ours, as there is a lot of emotion that is shown, much like ours and there is also a massive amounts of camera angles that were used in this video, and this is what we wanted to do in ours, to show a little variety.