Ed Sheeran - Give Me Love Analysis

Above is the music video to the Ed Sheeran song Give Me Love and the video is purely narrative based. Although this music definitely fits into the indie genre, it only shares a few of the characteristics. For example Indie music videos usually take full advantage of steady cams and handheld cameras that make it look as though they filmed it themselves, however this video does the opposite. With the use of special effects and filtering on many of the shots you can tell it is a professional video and not something that Ed Sheeran whipped up at home! However there is this feeling of calmness throughout of the video which most Indie videos try to incorporate into their videos with lots of the shots being in slow motion and with there being very little 'extras' in the scenes apart from the main characters that are acting. Alongside this most of the scenes seem to be set at night time which not only increases the fantasy effect that the director has aimed for but also emphasises this idea of being calm and natural. It also uses lots of high key lighting to its effect, similar to most other indie videos like it.

There are a few connections between the lyrics and visuals for example when Ed sings 'I just wanna hold ya'  and in the video we see two wooden dolls hugging each other. To see a small connection is quite vital for Indie music videos I have found, as they tend not to be quite as conceptual as other genres of music like pop. However in this music video there seems to be more of a connection between the music and visuals rather than the lyrics and visuals. The first example of this is at 1:13 when the beat goes from slow to a but faster and the visuals portray this by having the girl move more rapidly when the faster beat kicks in. The director also mirrors the music and the visuals when they have the arrows hitting each person on the beat for example at 2:07 and at 2:11. 

This video is very different from many other music videos I have looked at in the fact that it doesn't have a lot of emphasis placed on the artist. Like most of Ed Sheeran's music videos you never really see him in them or he only has cameo roles in them which is also seen in this particular one. This is because of two reasons; one is the fact that his music and his known status can carry him threw nowadays and there is no real need for him to be in his videos as everyone knows him but also because he isn't what the music industry would call 'photogenic' and they don't necessarily want him to be the face of his music. There are also inter textual references throughout this video to cupid and thoroughly uses the notion of looking as we see the girl almost 'spying' on most of the other people in the video.