Analysis of Ed Sheeran ‘Give Me Love’ music video.

Analysis of Ed Sheeran ‘Give Me Love’ music video.

Like many Ed Sheeran music video’s ‘Give Me Love’ is a narrative about a young girls life, starting at the end and circling round showing you her full story of her life without having any bands performing during it.

The song is about a girl who turns into a Cupid and is helping others to find love by shooting her arrows at people she sees on the street. This helps to entertain Ed’s target audience as many 15-25 year olds are interested in mythical creatures such as Cupid, Vampires and Werewolves. Having the girl find out she’s cupid at the begging of the video helps the audience to sympathies with her as she feels like she doesn’t fit in and has to do what is expected of her, just like a lot of the target audience feel. Ed Sheeran didn’t write this song for a specific gender as both male and female’s between the ages of 15-25 will empathies with main character in this video. 

The music video begins with the main character found dead in her flat with an arrow in her neck, letting the audience establish that she was either murdered or committed suicide. Having the narrative of the piece start from the end bring the circular motion effect of the end during the beginning. This will make the audience feel interested in the piece and continue watching because they want all of their questions answered. They want to know why she has an arrow through her neck and why she has wings. Having all of these questions shown at the end makes people watch the video to have a clear understanding as to how they got there.

During the video Ed Sheeran has the images portray the words he sings. An example of this is when he sings “I just wanna hold ya”. Subsequent to this the image (right) is shown. This is really effective as it Ed Sheeran sings and simultaeneously portrays he’s words through images like this one on the right. The audience can emphasise with this as they themselves would feel lonley at some point in time.

Ed Sheeran bases part of his music video in a dark and dingy flat as it represents what most of the target audience feels. Most people in the age range (15-25 year olds) feel alone and isolated therefore emphasising with what the main character of the narative is feeling. This is shown from the lighting used in the video. The main light source is coming from the lamp, the midground, drawing peoples attention to the middle of the sence and connoting that is little hope in dark times; needless to say there is always a white bright light at the end of each tunnel. In addition to this, the background has a street lamp in it to let the audience subconsiously denote that this song is based in a city. Also the light in the foreground shown by the misty smoke is used to give of a magical feel that is explained later on in the video. A more basic reason they had used white light to shine in the scene is simple because white light refect better off of white fabric – highlighting the main character of the scene.

Ed sheeran uses mainly dark colours in his piece to enphasise the bad times as that is what his song is about. The fact that he seems to use this throughout the piece – minus the end and the shooting arrows – is to show the audience that negativitey is all around them, which is what most of the audience already thinks.

The protaganist of the piece is wearing mainly white to symbolise purity and innocence. This is because Ed Sheeran wants to show the audience that all pure things in life are tainted by badness therefore not as they seem. This would alow them to once again emphasise with the audience as most of the audience would feel as it they are the angle and they are the ones being tainted by society.

All in all there are a lot of things Ed Sheerans video reprents – society’s point of view, innocence and lonleyness – each show in there own indevidual way. All of which could be borrowed and used again in a different video by someone else, for something else.