Video analysis

This Music Video is perfect in terms of showing the different influences stars use in their videos, this video in perticular shows clearly who Beyonce has taken inspiration from.


For example it's obvious that the video is heavily influenced by the 60s era, for example, the bold change of colours and make-up/look with influences from Audrey Hepburn. The picture above coming from Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn, showing the inspiration Beyonce has taken from it, clothing and hairstyle and also dance moves.

Furthermore, the sequence where Beyonce is wearing a grey jumper with a heavy full fringe represents a scene from Flashdance, where the character dances around her "apartment" in that same outfit.

Although there has been controversy that Beyonce has blantantly stolen ideas from a Beligian Choreographer, who claims two of her pieces and sequences have been used in Beyonce's video without permission, for example the video on the left, shows the sequence originally called Rosas danst Rosas.

Being very conventional to Pop/RnB music, a lot of close-ups are used whilst Beyonce sings into the camera, for example at the very beginning, this shows that the artist is to be focused on and straight away gets the audiences attention. Although, due to the heavy editing and references to stars such as Audrey Hepburn, I would say this video targets only women or at least a very small minority of men, but a variety of ages probably varying from young teenagers to maybe 28? Also, Beyonce is an artist who does mainly target women rather than men anyway. Also other shots such as long shots have been used in order to show the dance sequences which are also very conventional in Pop music.



Editing is a main factor in this video and has obviously been thought about a lot. For example, a lot of mirroring has been used such as at 1:17. Also, she has decided to use herself many times in one scene, such as 1:58, again very conventional and has been used in a lot of pop videos. Split screens has also been used, mainly for performance reasons and although the colours haven't been reversed, Andy Warhols paintings come to mind when I see that kind of editing in her video.