Music Video Analysis - Paradise (DONE)

Coldplay - Paradise
Paradise was a single from Coldplay's fifth studio album 'Mylo Xyloto'. The song was originally written for X-Factor winner Melodie Amaro. The album has singles on it such as 'Princess of China' and Every Teardrop is a Waterfall. Both of these videos took a narrative route as well as Paradise. The video starts off with the opening titles on the screen with a background of a wild scene. This immediately cuts to a scene of an 'elephant' behind bars who lets out a sigh. This maybe to show what the dreams of the elephant are, to be in the wild. This sets off the theme of the video which are for the elephant to escape to the wild. We see the elephant adding to a tally which appears to be the days he's been trapped. This is similar to humans in prison and this personifies the elephant because he acts in the same way. He then begins frantically trying to escape and breaks the lock open. We see the elephant run out of the 'zoo' being chased by two police men which again personifies the situation because normally policemen would not chase an 'animal' from a zoo. The following shots are short sharp shots to increase the intensity of the video. We can tell from the speed of the shots that the elephant is close to reaching the way out of his situation and we see this when he clocks a heathrow airport sign on the tube and the next shot cuts to him hiding in a hangar at an airport. After getting on the plane the elephant arrives at his destination and we can see this with the combination of a shot of his plane touching down and an establishing shot of the new scenery. The next few seconds is filled with multiple shots combined but they all share the same background. We can see the elephant dancing and holding boards with the lyrics on them.

 There's also a board asking for money laid on the ground which makes the audience realise that the elephant is busking for money. The elephant then arrives at a bicycle shop and immediately the audience knows he wants to buy one because he's been raising money. He then puts the money he raised on the counter and points to a bike that he wants, to then get told he can only afford a unicycle. This makes the audience feel sorry for the character whilst at the same time feel happy because he's found a mode of transportation. The following shots are a sequence of frames showing him riding his unicycle along roads and tracks until he finally reveals himself as being Chris Martin, the frontman of Coldplay. This finally makes us realise why they have been trying to personify the elephant, because it was a human. The video is edited chronologically because all the shots of the elephant reaching his destination come in order of events, and there is only one flashback which features at the very start. After a few establishing shots, we can see the same wild scene as we saw at the start, this means that the start was not the dream for the 'elephant' but was a flashback, the colour of this setting in the set set dark orange, this is because orange represents enthusiasm, determination, strength, endurance, success and encouragement. It also gives the sensation of heat, which re-enforces the location that the video is set. This links in with the target audience because the colour orange is 'highly accepted' among young people. The next shot is a shot of the elephant walking in a field with unicycle in tow, this in when we first see more wildlife in the form of giraffes, and finally we see the rest of his 'heard' in the form of his bandmates dressed in elephant costumes.

This makes the audience aware that the rest of the video will not have a narrative as the elephant has finally reached his destination. This is right because the rest of the video is indeed performance based. The video switches almost seamlessly from characters in a desert to the characters doing a live performance on stage. They are still wearing the elephant heads though so they were prepared to film part of the video when they performed live.