This Beauty - Lyric Analysis

 



With a song such as This Beauty, the lyrics are crucial to it's meaning and how it should be presented visually. We decided very early on that our understanding of the lyrics would act as our main guide to creating the video and more impostantly to our storyboard. We wanted to have key moments and lyrics pointed out visually in our video, so that the link between music, visuals and the lyrics is strong and quite easy to identify for the audience.

The meaning behind This Beauty is truly a critque of the media and how they define "true beauty", filled with editied images and hiding behind make up. It talks of returning back to natural things and understanding that beauty comes from the person it belongs to, not the outward appearance that everyone else see's. Amanda sings as someone who is regularly crticised for her appearance, something that is especially true for her place in the oublic eye that comes from her profession.

Some of the lines we thought would work well in having a visual guide were those they had strong imagery attatched to the lyrics. "And those greens and those blues / Seem too perfect to be true" is a great example of this. We had the image of a slow panning shot depicting both the green of the treetops against the blue sky for this line, as it represented the idea so well and kept to our theme of nature perfectly whilst also giving the video more richness in colour. Hopefully this will be possible to capture on the day of our shoot.

Another line that we thought would work well was the line "An imperfected me will not be seen". For this, we pictured a static shot that showed our Amanda seamlessly disappearing into her location, either behind the trees or travelling out of shot. We think this could be could at representing the shameful nature of being seen as imperfect and Amanda at first conforming to this. This way, we may also be able to show some character progression throughout the video through other shots.

Analysing the lyrics has provided a good starting point for our ideas and for understanding the deeper message of the song and therefore, its good that we have managed to do this before stoaryboarding. We can now move on to developing some of our ideas.