Friendly Fires - 'Kiss Of Life'

Friendly Fires' music is an eclectic mix of numerous sub-genres such as; alternative dance, electro and disco house.

The video begins with a long shot which is not focusing on the background, instead it focuses on the plant in the foreground. The focus then switches to the blurry figures so the audience can make out the men dressed in brightly coloured clothing holding tribal drums, one of the men is dressed all in black, and two of the others are dressed in black and white this makes them stand out.

The next shot is almost an extreme close-up of the lead singer, this is signified by his lip syncing to the words. The use of an extreme close-up isn't that conventional as usually, despite the focus being on the lead singer, the camera tends to focus less closely on their face, as their image/style is important, and that involves their hair and clothes.

Cut away shots in between the close-ups are cut to the beat and very short. They feature more close-ups of instruments being played, this is a common convention of performance video. The instruments and the dancing create an energetic atmosphere for the audience which is expected of a dance video, as the aim of the dance genre is to get the audience to want to dance.

There are some longer shots of the band together in the frame following this, the lead singer is dancing, this is something which for this band is a famous signature move in a similar way to artist such as Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley but on a far smaller scale; however this may be where the front man took his inspiration from. This section of the video is also in slow motion. The shot cuts to a girl doing a similar dance, also in slow motion, she has blonde hair and skin on show, which attracts a male gaze, however her face is covered by a mask so this is counter-typical of that.

This would be classified as a concept video, despite the other band members playing instruments, they aren't playing specifically the instruments which can be heard on the track, this is a common convention of the dance genre videos. Though there are some common aspects seen in pop videos and performance videos such as focus on the lead singer. The concept of the video is based around the location, and the backing dancers which are dressed peculiarly with brightly coloured clothes and gold, hooked nose masks. The video is quite simplistic and could therefore have quite a cheap production cost, however the beach location looks as though it is in a hot country and as Friendly Fires are an English band, this would suggest they would have had the cost of travel added to their video.

Elliptical editing is used, this is signified by a silhouette shot of the lead singer where the sun is clearly much duller and has set further than the previous section of the video where it is very brightly lit.

This video uses a wide variety of shots and has relatively fast paced editing, the shots are not chronological or even similar at times, towards the end it's a complete miss match of shots used. Some of the shots are quite artistic, such as shots of a girls eye behind the masks they're wearing, this is more common of an indie genre, this highlights the difficulty of matching common codes and conventions to a genre, when there are so many sub-genres and so many artists produce music which is of a slightly different style to their previous work each time they release new songs.