Video Analysis: Newton Faulkner – Badman

This video was made for the song Badman, coming from Newton Faulkner’s second album ‘Rebuilt by Humans’. The music produced by Faulkner is heavily acoustic; however, there is not much reference to this in the video for Badman. For example, it is a common convention of the genre for an acoustic guitar to feature somewhere in the video but there is no appearance in this video. Though this is the case, the artist is a white male with dreads and a beard. This gives him one of the stereotypes that are linked with the acoustic genre that he is a hippie-like character. This stereotype is also hinted it at through the lyrics of the song which are made up of the artist asking someone to run away from civilisation to ‘fields and tree’s’.
Throughout the song there a various links between the lyrics and the visuals in the video. Firstly, the artist sings about fields being built upon and sings ‘shopping malls from meadows’ while he sings this he is walking through a meadow-like forest, surrounded by trees and greenery. The whole video is made up of the artist running through forests and fields to get away from civilisation and where everything is being built on and this relates directly to the chorus of the song which is made up of the repeated lines ‘Do you want to hide inside your house?’ and ‘Please just run away with me’.
Links are also made between the visuals in the video and the music, the most obvious of which is near the beginning of the video where there is a steady drum beat and the artist steps and bangs his feet in time with the beat of the dream. It would also usually be expected to see an acoustic guitar somewhere within the video however there is not one in this video.
There is one long continuous shot of the artist throughout the whole video and varies between mid-shots and close ups but the video contains mostly close ups of his face, this helps him include and emphasise emotions in his music and video. The video also includes the notion of looking as the artist looks straight down the camera at various times in the video. The video does not really include any intertextual references at any point in its duration.
The video is quite unusual for the acoustic genre; it is very abstract as it one continuous shot of the artist walking through a forest however, he has no body and he is a giant head with his dreads in boots. Though the video is quite obviously abstract there is a small element of performance as the artist is lip synching the words while walking in the video.
In this video I quite like the sense of abstract as this is not commonly used in acoustic videos so I think it is something good to use when producing my own video and think it helps set the video apart from others of its kind and helps give it something unique. What I don’t like about the video is that it is just the one long tracking shot of the artist and I think a variety of shots could have been used to increase the quality of the video. Also, I feel more locations could have been used, particularly more adventurous than just fields and a forest.