Three days grace-“Never too late”
The video that I will be analysing is ‘Never too late’ by ‘Three Days Grace’, under Jive Records’ label. The genre is Alternative Rock; its broad characteristics that conform to the genre are the performance sections and their style of dress. The video also challenges the typical conventions of the genre by its use of an acoustic guitar in the video.
‘Never too late’ is a prime example of videos from three days grace, as they are part performance and mostly narrative. The band always keeps a performance section in their videos to reinforce in the audience’s mind that they are a band and play their own music.
The video starts with the lead singer playing his guitar under spotlight in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, gradually the rest of the screen lights up to show the inside of a family home. Use of rule of thirds is made here by the singer being bottom right and the important part of the narrative being top left. This takes the shape of a young girl’s bedroom. She is seen to be taking the hands of her mother and father and dancing around the room. The connotations of this image are a strong family link, bringing the audience in to the sense of a welcoming family atmosphere. The relationship between lyrics and visuals is strengthened here by the introduction of the song closely linking to the on screen motion. This part of the video is illustrative of the music.
As the tempo of the song increases and more dynamic instruments are introduced, the screen cuts to a woman struggling to get away from what initially appears to be nurses. At this point, the editing is in time with the sound track, the visuals are cut to the beat, this helps the audience consume the video in close relation to the soundtrack that the video is essentially promoting. This quickly cuts away to a side on shot of the lead singer in dark surroundings, there are light shapes in the background created with directional lighting, and these lights have template filters on them to create silhouettes of the rest of the band playing. The dark surroundings are symbolic of the meaning of the song and the use of white light connotes light trying to escape from the dark i.e. trying to find happiness in such a dark life.
There is another cut back to the family scene; the camera is in a fixed position, still showing the same amount of the house as the opening, they are still dancing. The camera cuts to a medium close up to show the joy on the child’s face. The next cut goes back to the singer as he sings “you want to end your life”. This establishes the fact that the child will become the woman when she’s older and she is being restrained in a psychiatric ward.
By using semiotics, it is seen that women in music videos are not always represented in the same ways that are typical of TV Drama, in that this video does not present all of them as the mother figure(accept the mother at start and end), the weaker being, or the sleep about. There are intertextual references to film and TV drama in the way the woman is visualised, there is use of dismemberment in that the woman is introduced using her legs and face. She is not an ugly person, thus even in such a dark video there is the idea of the artificial look, she looks good and well as being well made up, even when in a psychiatric hospital. In terms of ideological discourse the woman in the video is seen to portray a stereotypical trait of the frailty of women. The girl is seen to be a happy young child until the break of her family, from this point on the tone of the music is shown to create a sense of pain and frustration, this is followed by the fact that she eventually wants to kill herself when she is older.
The room in which the woman is in is relatively bare, the walls are plain and there is a bed in the middle of the room, a typical hospital type curtain on wheels is in the corner and there is a table of belts, reels etc. This table denotes tying up the woman to the bed to restrain her from self harm. However this has connotations of the pain and sorrow that she goes through as she does not want to live her life anymore.
The table is significant to the meaning of the video as it supports the conventions of unhappiness and creates a dark sense to the room. However it becomes important when the butterfly rests on it as such a symbol of life and freedom it challenges the meaning of its landing ground.
The tempo increases and the electric guitar is made more prominent, at this point the video is based around the performance of the band. You cannot see the performers clearly as most of the screen is dark and pro filmic lighting effects are used to make the instruments light up, much of what you see is shadows. There is a pan shot that swings from an up angle shot at the singer round to the rest of the band and landing on the drummer.
The singer is shown at various angles and generally the one who is clearest in shot, there are shots of the guitarist and the drummer who are not clear but visible, and the importance of the band is recognised by the movement of the shadows of the drum sticks on the yellow light patches on the wall.
During this sequence, the band and scene does not occupy the full screen, their performing area takes various shapes and sizes depending on the lights being used and the angle at which they are placed on the screen. Post production, the image is tilted to one side in many of the performing shots.
Throughout this video, light is generally dim, but the pro filmic use of light is generally with a light yellow directional lamp. This technique is especially used in the meat shot, which is often repeated and shows the band moving up tempo and the singer leaning forward into the microphone. Using Goodwin’s theory of the notion of looking, during these shots the lead singer is seen looking into the camera, this is seen as a link between the artist and the consumer, this combines with Dyer’s theory of paradoxes, the star remains present and absent from the consumer, ordinary yet extraordinary, in that the audience feels like although the artist is inaccessible as they are shown in a star quality image and are on screen, however Goodwin’s notion of looking helps to bring the artist into the audience’s world by creating a link as though the song is being performed to them.
As the song slows down again we are reintroduced to the family scene, the hands of the family come apart and the girl is left alone. Suddenly the music becomes a type of tension builder and the shot length is reduced as the scene inter-cuts between the woman being strapped to a bed and the girl hiding underneath a similar looking bed. The lyrics seem to be attempting to talk to the young girl “it’s not too late to save yourself”
After a fade to black, the young girl is seen alone in her bedroom seeming intrigued at black feathers falling in front of her, this cuts to a point of view shot showing the “angel of death” spoken of in the lyrics. The girl seems amazed at what she is seeing, as the angel appears male human with big black bird’s wings. The mise-en-scene of this shot is not one that I’d initially be analytical of, the room is fairly stark and there’s plenty of empty space, the room is light to contrast with the dark bird and its feather. The girls lips are fairly rich in bright red colour and her eyes are bold which shows the innocence and intrigue in the girls face, this challenges the opposite side of the room where there is less detail and a dark overwhelming feeling of the big black bird. During this sequence, the 180* rule is broken, in that there appears to be no room for the crew to work, it is possible to take the idea that this is the music video version of shot-reverse-shot.
It appears at this time in the narrative that the girl has seen how bad life will become, this is challenged in the next shot, as the woman lay bound in her bed she sees a butterfly in her room. Her pained facial expression changes to that of intrigue and almost a faint smile. The singer is seen singing “this world will never be what I expected” and shortly after “its not too late”. From this point, the girl and the woman are seen in an inter-cutting section, both on their beds with the black feathers falling on them, this connotes that they are the same person. The straps are seen to fall off the woman and as this happens the room appears to light up to a light yellow, as this happens a faint smile appears on her face and she starts to walk towards the camera as it tracks out away from her. The video finishes in a reverse of how it started, the girl is going to bed and her family are saying goodnight to her, the home scene fades out leaving the singer in the bottom right hand side to finish the song, then the screen fades to black.
The video is predominantly performance based, although a long section is taken up by the performance moment which also shows where the meat shot is taken from. The camera stays at generally a medium close up for most of the song, accept for in the house where is varies between an establishing shot when the singer is on screen, an MCU when the family are shows and a CU when the child’s reaction is shown. The use of an extreme close up was used for times to show the linking and separating of hands.
This song was the third song on their second album and was highly successful when released as a single. It featured in “NOW!26” and made the band highly successful. As with most of the videos from Three days grace’s songs, the lyrics have strong connection with the narrative, such as “you want to end your life” and “this world will never be what I expected”. The video is written to work with the lyrics so that the song is listened to closely in order to explain what is actually happening in the video.
