Heart To Heart is a single by James Blunt. The single was released for digital download on 3rd February 2014, but the official music video was released earlier, on December 17th 2013.
This is one of my favourite music videos. I absolutely love the song and I think the video to go with it is fantastic. I decided to analyse the video to see if there was anything I could use in my video.
What is the video about?
Heart to Heart is a song which appears to be written by James Blunt to somebody else. It talks about how even though there are times where he gets frustrated, and he doesn't know where he stands, it doesn't matter because "you know shine even on a rainy day". The song is about how it doesn't matter what happens between them, they will always still "see eye to eye, heart to heart". Throughout the video, there are small shots of other couples that the song could relate to - couples of all ages and sexuality, but also familial couples, such as father and son or mother and baby. The song talks about how every relationship has its good points and bad points but at the end of the day, they will be there for each other until the day they die. It's very cute, really.
What type of video is it?
This music video merges two types of music video - performance and concept. There are various obvious performance elements to the video, such as the artist clearly singing the lyrics for the entire song. However, this is an unusual style of performance video. The artist is not performing to an audience, or even performing on stage, but performing to the viewer of the video in front of various stop-motion locations. The video is set in a very urban location. At points, even the artist appears to be singing in stop-motion but it is still clear that it is him who is singing the song. Having James Blunt have such a prominent part in the music video helps to raise the artist's profile; one of the main purposes of a music video.
Goodwin's Theory
This video also follows many of the conventions of Goodwin's theory. For example, in this video the demands of the record label clearly included the need for lots of close-ups of the artist. Again, this links with the prevalence of James Blunt in this video, which helps to raise his profile and enhance his success with future singles.
The music video also demonstrates certain genre characteristics. For example, since the genre of Heart to Heart is pop, it would be expected to see lots of warm, inviting colours and popular locations. An example of this in the James Blunt video would be the shot of a busy amusement park lit up at night. Popular locations such as this target the audience of the pop genre and so make them more interested in the video and as if they can relate to it because they get particularly excited by something. 
There is also a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. For example, James Blunt is seen to be singing the lyrics throughout the video. However, as well as this, there is another way that the lyrics and the visuals are linked. Throughout the video, you see pairs of people - romantic couples, father and son, child and mother - and these are representative of the meaning of Blunt's song - that wherever they go in the world, they will always see heart to heart and eye to eye. This is another way in which the lyrics and visuals are linked.
A link between the music and visuals can also be seen. For example, despite the whole video being stop-motion, there is one point where the music stops for a short amount of time and James Blunt sings without a backing track. At this point, the stop-motion freezes in the background behind him, as can be seen in the screenshot. During this time, nothing moves until the music starts again apart from James Blunt who is singing.
How successful is this video and why?
Personally, I think this video is very successful. The song only peaked at Number 42 in the UK music chart and so was not a particularly popular song in the country. However, on the YouTube version of this music video alone, it has had over 9,100,000 views. This is representative of the fact that the music video did help in increasing the profile of James Blunt's new album and also the song. I also think the video achieves everything it would want to. It is entertaining for the audience, but also helps to raise the artist's profile and advertise the fact that a new song has been released - or, at the time of launching this video, is soon to be released. The video makes me really happy with the warm colours, happy song and cute scenes.
Is there anything from this music video that I will use in mine?
I do like the idea of having a music video, similar to this one, where the artist is seen singing the songs in various different - almost random - locations. It makes the video really interesting to watch and so I would love to try something similar with mine. This video has inspired me to create a performance video that also has elements of a concept music video, with the artist performing to the viewer of the video as opposed to an on-screen audience.
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