Monday 5 September 2011

Music Video Deconstruction 11

Song: The Bloodening
Band: Johnny Truant
Year: 2006


  • Johnny Truant was a British, Brighton-based metalcore band, formed in 2000.
  • The band recorded their debut release The Repercussions of a Badly Planned Suicide (which featured three remixed songs from their second demo) in 2002 which was released on Undergroove Records. Their second album, In the Library of Horrific Events was produced by Killswitch Engage guitarist, Adam Dutkiewicz. The band have toured the UK, Europe and Canada with the likes of Killswitch EngageAs I Lay DyingCancer Bats and Alexisonfire as well as playing Download Festival in 2005, 2006 and 2008.
  • They were set to support Bring Me The Horizon in the US with Misery Signals and The Ghost Inside, however on October 31, 2008 the band unexpectedly announced on their Myspace that they were to split following their December UK tour.[1] The band played their final show on December 17, 2008.
  • The video for The Bloodening is taken from their second album, In The Library Of Horrific Events, released in 2005.
  • It begins with an extreme long shot of the band as the guitarist plays the opening notes of the song; in the second bar, it switches to a regular long shot of the band.
  • They are all wearing white t-shirts and black jeans in this video, and all instruments are darkly-coloured.
  • The lighting is very limited as well; the only light in the room shines on the band, with the rest of the area in darkness.
  • As soon as the drums, vocals and bass come in, there is a very brief flash of lettering across the screen, the title of the song. It appears for about a fifth of a second, and it was very hard to get a picture of on YouTube! 
  • The camera begins to focus on Olly Mitchell, the vocalist, as he begins the vocals of the song. The camera is on a crane due to the height of some the angles used.
  • The high-angle pans across the band as they play, following the guitarist, vocalist then bassist. 
  • The camera often zooms back out to its establishing shot, i.e. the extreme long shot that shows all the band playing.
  • In the parts where Olly isn't screaming, and he's singing, a handheld camera is used, either that or a camera that's being shaken. There is a close-up of him that is repeatedly shook to add atmosphere to the song and video.
  • There are a few over-the-shoulder shots used, especially when focusing on Paul (Jackson, drums) that are done using a crane as well.
  • Similarly to the title card used extremely briefly, there are frequent flashes of shapes throughout the video, such as fire and rain. They only appear for a fraction of a second. 
  • The shaking camera style is used extensively when focusing on vocals, and at both low and high angles it is used as well. 
  • A brief bit of narrative concept is implemented around halfway through the song; various members of the band are seen running through series of grimy, stony corridors. The shooting style here is done using a handheld cam, and a lot of blurry effects are used to hint at the slipping of sanity.
  • In the middle part of the section, with the clean guitar break, a strange orange tint is applied to the film, giving it a more atmospheric feel again, even though it is subtle. 
  • Once the song lurches back into its metallic start, the same hectic style of filming is applied again, once more with a quick flash of text, this time displaying the lyric "BURY THE CORPSES". 
Another flashing title, this one only came
up for about a third of a second.
The pyrotechnics used.












  • The video ends with the band playing the end of their song as a ring of fire and smoke engulfs them, adding a pyrotechnic aspect, and atmospheric one to the video, using the same ELS style of shooting as they had done before. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are moderated, please ensure the what you write is appropriate. Trolls gon' troll.