Video analysis according to Goodwin's theories

Textual analysis – Titanium

Titanium was a song by David Guetta featuring Sia. It falls into the genre of house music or Dance/electric. The song was released in 2011 and appears in the album ‘Nothing but a beat’ – this album sold more than 4 million copies in the UK alone. David Guetta is a French DJ and has composed many different songs all featuring different artists.

Narrative

The music video is completely narrative based, there is no performance element.  The artist does not appear in the music video and there is no lip syncing throughout the duration of the video. The music video is primarily about a teen how has supernatural powers and he is being tracked down because people believe him to be dangerous but in fact he’s just scared and all alone. To begin with the editing is quite slow and there are a lot of continuous shots where the camera tracks the young person. But as it gets to the chorus the beat starts to get faster and so does the editing, the editing is now cut to the beat of the chorus, it then slows down again when the chorus finishes. Two of Goodwin’s theories are used within the music video. The first is screens within screens; half way through the music video the young person enters his empty house the TV is on and we as the audience has a clear view of what its showing. It shows a bird’s eye view shot of the school with the caption ‘Supernatural occurrence at a local school’ this helps the audience to understand what happened to the school before the start of the music video.  

Settings

The music video itself is not realistic as people don’t have supernatural powers in everyday life. However, there is an element of intertextuality, the whole music video has links to the 1980s film E.T. directed by Stephen Spielberg. The Boys supernatural powers resemble the powers from the alien in the film. In the film E.T.’s finger glows whereas in the music video the teen’s whole body glows.  We start off in a school that appears to have been trashed, at this point we as the audience have no idea what’s happened all we see is a young person alone and scared so instantly we begin to feel sorry for him – this is before we find out that he was the one that caused it.

Representations

The music video shows quite a negative representation of teenagers, the teenage boy is portrayed as being reckless. He wears a red hat throughout the duration of the music video; the colour red has connotations of danger this suggests that the teenage boy is to be feared this is also suggested at the end of the music video where we can see a fully grown man pointing a gun at the boy as if he was scared of him. When the teenage boy reaches his house it’s empty, no other people are in the house. It appears that he is all on his own, almost like he’s alienated from the rest of society, this links to E.T. because E.T. is very much alienated within earth, because he’s on a planet that doesn’t understand him and he doesn’t fit in.  The teddies that are spinning around in the air in his bedroom like he’s just left them there and forgot about them, this could connote the disregard for his inner child as he begins to grow.  

Target Audiences 

I think that the target audience for this particular music video would be teenagers because the main character in the video is of this age category. The music video is also based around supernatural powers this also attracts the younger generations. Also the fact that the gender of the main character is not clear it also expands the target audience to male and females.