Video Analysis

Fatboy Slim – Weapon of choice

In this video there are just narrative elements involved. The piece uses a film-like quality for example including Christopher Walken to be the centre point. It’s a disjuncture piece because Walken basically roams a mansion including dance and CGI effects to interest the viewer, and has no obvious link with the music or lyrics. The piece is a fairly simple one, though has a lot of small tricky elements to keep the viewer interested, such as the clear body doubles in the routines, and the ‘Matrix-like’ high flying manoeuvres.

However, the piece does use star image taking many close up/extreme close ups of Walkens face. The camera often focuses on the star when there is either a short gap in the music, where the star makes a gesture with either his face or his hands to invoke comedic aspects to the performance. It’s clear to see that Fatboy Slim’s idea of using a Hollywood A-lister is clearly to increase profits and interest towards their music.

The camera shots in this piece range from the beginning establishing shot and the many long shots of Walken and the house features, to some extreme close ups/close ups of him to make the star image. The use of tracking shots when the star is on the move are effective as they are mainly body level and gives you the feel his dancing is somehow aimed towards you. There is also a great low angled medium long tracking shot, of him dancing down a hallway which uses the mirrors on either side of the walls very cleverly to give a shot of his figure turned into unlimited versions of his routine through the mirror image of his mirror image.

The video mainly has medium ranged shot showing around half of his body at one time as to show the details of the gesture filled, odd dance routine.

The editing in this is narrative as in the order of the shots to show his journey throughout the house, the cutting is varied though as they speed up on the basis of the music being played, for instance there is pretty much just a tracking shot for the verses, however when the chorus comes the cuts increase and the shots vary from further to closer towards Walken. The use of a cycle edit where the story ends where it began is also used in this piece as Walken begins in his seat and ends there two, this is also then turned into a fade shot to black which symbols the end of the video.