Generic Research - Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #1

 Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #1 - Fell in Love With A Girl - The White Stripes

The White Stripes “Fell in Love with A Girl” music video, which is well known as being a masterpiece of stop motion. It is a fun, ingenious music video that utilises stop-motion animation entirely through LEGO bricks. The video itself is extremely abstract, using only red, blue, yellow, black, and white bricks, with the classic rectangular LEGO shape – so no special parts such as minifigures or bevelled bricks.

The camera is static throughout the whole video, and camera movements are simulated only by moving LEGO bricks. Occasionally, match cuts are used to hide the transitions between different styles as well. Due to the movement of the two-dimensional blocks, the images are very hectic and lively, but still provides the typical stop-motion appearance with the flickering of the camera and the slight imperfections in the bricks.

The video itself is almost entirely performance based but has a very slight element of narrative in the beginning that sets up the entire video. It briefly shows a little boy – the director’s son- building a wall of LEGO bricks. This is the only scene in the video that shows anything other than LEGO bricks, and very briefly creates a narrative – these bricks are meant to be the creation of a child, or more accurately, are fun and meaningless in nature, simply meant to create an interesting visual effect. The video also follows a cyclical structure in the sense that the boy creates a black screen of bricks and the video ends on a black screen as well. The simple technique of narrative creation used in this video is very inspiring and has highlighted the importance of getting my narrative elements across in as short a time as possible.

Importantly to my research, the video upholds a very solid brand identity with their use of colour – staying entirely within the brand identity of Jack and Meg White’s signature red, black and white. While this is seemingly a simple design choice it greatly influences the mise-en-scene of the video creating bold, striking visual effects that are befitting of the White Stripe’s music and genre.