Good Life - Kanye West (VIDEO ANALYSIS)

This video is very different to the others I’ve analysed. This video is 100% performance. The entire focus of the video is Kanye and T-Pain, but instead of props, scenery or narrative they opted for a style which incorporates graffiti/doodle style visuals surrounding them. The way these doodles work is that they follow the lyrics, visually representing whatever is being rapped about at the time. This is done almost exactly to what the lyrics are, even at times just spelling out the lyrics. This is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time because on one hand it’s showing entertaining and exciting visuals that get people to know all the lyrics and sing along as opposed to just liking a song for its beat. It’s a bad thing though that the video becomes a bit empty and without content. In an overly critical perspective one could say that the video has nothing to offer if the visuals do nothing. But I feel that the animations and art carry the whole video throughout, making it entertaining and exciting. I like the use of colour in this video, very vibrant and matches the style of the song itself. As a result, theres very little mise-en-scene throughout, but one thing that they use is a pair of sunglasses with additional animations in the frames. I think this a good fit for the songs theme. The song itself is about how good life has gotten now that Kanye is an established name in hip-hop and the sunglasses symbolise what he is seeing now that he has prestige and fame. This would be a great thing to attribute into my own video, the concept of seeing things through someone’s eyes. The sound in this video is pretty much just the audio from the original song, which is fine, except some of the censoring is awful. It takes some of the fun out of the song when there’s a massive blur over things. Some of the swearing as well is censored by deepening the voices and reversing them at times. There was also a lot of times when swearing was replaced with just silence. It breaks up the rhythm of the song and makes some of the animations make little sense. When I come to making my video I want to make sure that the song I pick doesn’t have swearing in it or inappropriate props such as drugs or pornography. The lighting and filters in the video are minimalistic due to the main focus being the animated graffiti. They use a black and white filter on Kanye, T-Pain and the model in the video. This is to emphasise the graffiti because like I said they were the main focus. The editing is rather limited because of the graffiti as well. The shots and camera angles throughout would often be fixed full body shots of Kanye rapping while all the animation goes on around him. I feel that despite how well everything fits together in this video and how well the intended final result of this video is hit dead on that it isn’t entirely relevant to the genre of rap. Rap videos are generally edgy or gritty and show despair or roughness. I feel I can incorporate certain things about this video into my own project but unfortunately a lot of it I don’t feel I can apply. Although, if I were to make a light-hearted music video with a light subject then I would definitely take a lot of inspiration from this video. It’s eccentric illustrations and performance make it an enjoyable and enticing video to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEKEjpTzB0Q