Music video analysis: Gabrielle Aplin - Salvation

The genre of Gabrielle Aplin's song Salvation is folk. The video is a concept video, mostly showing emotion through dance and movement.

The video is set in a rather modern building which makes folk rather contemporary in contrast with the way that folk is often presented, as retro and traditional. The music video centres around Gabrielle Aplin dancing with a male dance partner and lip syncing to parts of the song. Salvation was released as the fifth single from Gabrielle's debut studio album English Rain (2013). The slow motion shots of the partners dancing convey the emotion of the song and the dance almost tells the narrative of the song in its own right. Storytelling is a key component of folk music and it is very unusual to see a folk video with no meaning behind the shot choices.

The characters are wearing black and white or just white throughout the dancing during the video. Gabrielle sings of her 'salvation', the dictionary definition of salvation is preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss. From the lyrics of Salvation we can assume that her salvation is another person and due to the nature of the dancing in the video the man present is a representation or her salvation. I do not see the characters as the binary opposites that Levi Strauss identified because of they way they dance as one unit and the sincerity that can be seen in both characters but that Gabrielle is tainted when in black and white is after she has been 'saved'.

A typical interpretation of white and black is good/pure and evil. Within this video the colours do connote binary opposites but I do not believe it is as straight forward as good and bad, as Gabrielle sings of her salvation, I think black is a representation of her imperfections and how he has made her feel pure. There are shots of Gabrielle singing in the shower with her eyeliner running down her face, this shows the emotion she feels towards the lyrics of the song and could also be interpreted as her washing away her sins/wrongdoings.

As the song heightens in tension the editing speed and shot duration speeds up, the flashing lights are very dramatic and go hand in hand with the nature of the song. The song is slow throughout and as Gabrielle uses her voice to convey the emotions the video changes its style to suit the song. This is
something which I have seen a lot when watching music videos, the speed of editing tends to reflect the tempo of the song.

The camera is hand held throughout the video with a variety of shots including many long shots and two shots to show their bodies completely. The lens flares which can be seen throughout are a nice touch as they are often used on very picturesque images and they add to the feel of beauty in the video.

The opening sequence of he video shows Gabrielle walking along with diegetic sounds being heard and then the transition is made to the white airy building which infers that this is perhaps a battle which she is experiencing inside of her mind.

A white butterfly is seen on the outside of the shower where Gabrielle is singing, when researching white butterflies I have read that they symbolise 'the ability to go through important changes with grace an lightness' which is a prominent message of this music video.