Analysis of a music video

Linkin Park- What I've Done 

This music video, is shot in the Californian desert, is by the Linkin Park, an American rock band. This song is from the album Minutes To Midnight. The band performing in desert is the main base track of the video that holds it together and the imagery of the band in a desert area is also replicated in the album cover and the official band website cover at the time. This is an aspect of intertextuality which would ensure that the audience are familiar with that same image and will help promote the artists better. 

The idea that this video wants to portray through this song is the sins of humanity or otherwise of what they define as a 'bad things' that humans have committed; including aspects such as war, genocide, world hunger, stem cell research, terrorism, etc. Emphasis on life is shown in various parts of this video by using colours of life such as blue and green as shown right at the beginning of the video, with the grass reversing into the mud, while this aspect is reinforced at the end with the grass, as juxtaposed, grows out of the mud itself. The use of time scheduled movements such as the appearance of clouds over time and the movement of cars portray how fast time is moving but nothing is being done to save the world.

A sense of slow motion is created (directly after the fast action in the video of explosions, world crises, riots and the falling of a statue of the dictator Saddam Hussein) is located after the instrumental (non-vocal) segment after the second chorus by slowing down the movement of the band members while implementing the collapse of the World Trade Centre. A small amount of ocean of life is used when Chester Bennington sings "and wash away...” which presents the video structure to be partly illustration.


Another interesting thing I noticed was how camera angles were used. This video was shot in an extremely sunny location; the camera is almost always shot from underneath the band members to create a sense of importance with the people. Furthermore, they used a lot of tracking shots to focus on the artists and instruments such as the drum set, which is a common element of rock and indie music videos. 

I also noticed how the sun is always behind the performers to make them stand out in the scene. The brightness of the sun is also used as a transition to atomic bomb tests near the end of the video. 

While CGI was used in small amounts to create an effect of fast motion, no transition effects were used between clips in order to speed up the pace of the video; instead lots of jump cuts were used to present the juxtaposition between world hunger (shot of the starving Africans) and an overweight (probably American) person chomping greedily on a big burger. There was also many other contradicting images shown such as a person measuring their waist (presumably to check how they’ve lost weight) which was followed by a jump cut to a limp, bony starving person in a third world country. The beginning with grass effects and time-movement scenes were nicely implemented. The way how everything was literally put into the video to give an image of one situation and another is something that Linkin Park had not previously done; this was a unique music video that really makes one think and question the actions (or lack of action) of mankind towards humanity. 

In the transition between the second chorus and the third were the lyrics, "Today this ends... [...] forgiving what I've done", there was the flower blooming and the baby. The repeated images of a baby, a growing flower and a baby scan is shown in between shots of someone injecting drugs inside them. This birth of both the flower and the baby represents a new start for a person or the world.

Overall, there are many things that made this an amazing song and video; the lyrics have double meaning. If someone was only listening to the song, they might interpret the lyrics about the band stating what they have become, what they may have done wrong and what they need to change. This would be reinforced by some of the lyrics such as ‘I’ll face myself, to cross out what I’ve become. Erase myself, and let go of what I’ve done’.  However, when one watches the music video with the song, they would realise the much deeper and specific meaning about what mankind has done to the world and how we need to put things right.                                                                                                      

Occasionally, the clips in this video change on the beat of the music but sometimes on the half beat. The lengths of the shots vary throughout the video and at times, the pictures change very fast from one historic moment to a disaster. I think this editing works well for the video as it may suggest how global tragedies and global warming is unpredictable and unexpected. Linkin Park have taken advantage of the fact that they have a global fan base by presenting the audience with these horrific images (the type of things people would usually ignore); the video was on all the major music channels, which made it impossible to ignore and the band sent out a chilling environmental message to the world. The success of this song was highlighted by the use of it in the hit movie Transformers, a blockbuster which has some relation to the subject in the song as it is partly about resources and it falling into the wrong hands. This meant that the song reached out to an even bigger audience and it led to another Linkin Park single, New Divide, to star in the sequel to Transformers.