kings of Leon//Walls
Kings of Leon are an American indie/rock band formed in Nashville in 2000, the band is made up of 3 brothers and one cousin;
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Caleb Followill
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Nathan Followill
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Jared Followill
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Matthew Followill
The video for their newest single “WALLS” is a performance video, the video primarily focuses on the lead singer Caleb and his stoic performance in front of the camera.
MISE EN SCENE
Throughout the music video the lighting is very lowkey, in some areas there are moments of brighter lighting and these are created through spot lights that are located above Caleb. Although they are located above him, they are positioned at an angle that makes a light shadow compared to a steam of light, this connotates with the hidden sadness that he feels.
The setting is in a minimalistic studio and he is positioned inside a box that has 3 walls encasing him, the walls are a deep burgundy colour which keeps the lighting low key. The walls surrounding him links backs to the lyrics “When the walls come down”. All the way through the video Caleb is blocked so that he is sitting down, he initially has a guitar for a while and then as the song continues to progress he set the guitar down. The guitar represents the group as being the typical ‘raw’ indie group that showcase their talents through instruments.
CAMERAWORK + EDITING
Later in the video the lighting changes from lowkey to natural, also the setting behind Caleb changes to, he goes from being in the studio surrounded by the walls to then being outside. We never see below Caleb’s shoulders as the setting changes so we don’t know if he is in a car or not. The shots outside are taken at dusk, which a lot of the time can connote with sadness. The change of setting again links back in with the lyrics “and the walls come down” so the video could also be classed as hybrid between performance/narrative as Caleb’s performance is narrating the lyrics.
Right at the beginning of the song, the establishing shot of Caleb in the studio, sitting with his guitar is overlayed multiple times to create an image that looks like a blur – like how things look whilst you’re crying. The video is very minimalistic, so they have avoided using any high end editing that would take the initial emotion away from the video. One thing that I noticed is that they haven’t used cuts, the video is just one long continuous shot of Caleb, this means that Caleb has the audience’s full attention throughout the video.
In the beginning, it starts off with an establishing shot of Caleb in the studio, which later goes into a slow zoom. The establishing shot allows us as the audience to notice the minimalistic setting and the use of the low-key lighting whilst the slow zoom then allows to realises that Caleb is the main character of the video. After the zoom has completely reached Caleb, we are then left with a close up of him, allowing to see his face and shoulders. Once we’ve gotten this shot, Caleb then holds eye contact with the camera, making the audience feel slightly uncomfortable but then later allows the audience to see the sadness in his eyes.
Like I mentioned before, the video is one long continuous shot, so to change the setting, a tracking shot is used, but instead of follow Caleb, he follows the camera and then the setting changes behind him. The tracking shot doesn’t allow us to break away from the screen, it engages us as the audience, as it makes us feel that the thing being shown is truly important as they haven’t allowed to break away from it.
REPRESENTATION + THEORISTS
I feel that for this video I could use Levi – Strauss’ theory of how we compare things based on binary opposites, but talk about how it then effects the audience when the roles are reversed. So, in a relationship a lot of the time women are seen as being the emotional ones and then the men are seen as being a lot stronger compared to the woman.
In the video for ‘WALLS’ by Kings of Leon, although Caleb is representing himself as being stoic, we can see how the relationship in the song has affected him and we see through the techniques used in the video. It then reverses the roles mentioned previously and shows the man being emotional about the relationship which then hits the audience harder than it would if it was woman in the video, as we have grown up with the stereotypical binary concept that men are stronger than women.
