Iconic Music Video – The Pigeon Detectives- David Manning

The Pigeon Detectives – This is an Emergency

The video starts with a 4 screen split with a focus on the close up shot of guitars being played in time with the music. This is something we could achieve in our music video as it is a simple shot. At different points, a section of the four screens switches to a close up of another instrument being played and then the mouth of the lead singer when they start in the song.

The screen stays split for the entirety of the video which becomes very repetitive and boring. Nevertheless the shots within the split screen are very interesting. Lighting becomes very important; it is usually very dimly light to give the impression of a club and playing live. At 1:15, in the top right corner there is a blue spot light that take focus in the shot, this blast of colour is very effective and catches the audiences eye. It also makes the signer appear as a silhouette.

From around 2:20 the spilt screen starts to show mid shots of the band members upper body and face. The upper body starts to move from left to right very, very quickly. The background, tie, shirt and suit colour of the band members all start to change really quickly as well. This gives the impression of strobe lighting in a club and is something we could easily achieve during the post production stage of our editing by enhancing colours and contrast of footage.

There is a lot of red used throughout the video, red lighting, red clothing, red instruments and red colour enhancing. This could be to link to the song title, This is an Emergency. Emergencies often have connotations of danger and blood and fear with are all connotations of the colour red. Emergencies are often represented by the colour red. Also the EP digipack for the song is a grey cartoon man screaming, however his mouth is a dull red colour, this again links to the red in the video and provides branding across the digipack and the music video.