RS - Deconstruction - Daft Punk - Around the World

Artist: Daft Punk

Track: Around the World

Year: 1997

Director: Michel Gondry

Target Audience: 15-24 

Genre: Electronic

The two masked members of Daft Punk

Daft Punk's classic "Around the World" falls under the "concept" catagory of music videos. The aspect of the music video is robots walking around circular platform hence "around the world" however it can also be seen as them going around a vinyl record. The main focus of the music video is the dance choreography and is very well done, the dancing is perfect and the dancers move together effortlessly. The dancing fits into the beat of the song such as 0:17 when the dancers are going down the stairs replicating someone going down the keys on a keyboard.

SOURCED FROM WIKIPEDIA
 

"This is meant to be a visual representation of the song; each element in the video represents a different instrument. According to Gondry's notes, the androids represent the singing robot voice; the physicality and small-minded rapidity of the athletes symbolizes the ascending/descending bass guitar; the femininity of the disco girls represents the high-pitched keyboard; the "itchy" skeletons serve for the guitars; the mummies represent the drum machine."

The geniuses behind the helmets/masks

Michel Gondry's fantastic directing has made a song only having 3 words, use dancers to replicate the instruments within the song and make it come to life. To do this requires extreme directing skill but also a fantastic dance choreographer because of the ammount of skill and time that went into this dance routine.

The wide range of costumes within the music video is unique as they define the different instruments within the song as Michel Gondry said. Each different costume is for each different instrument, they are a very strange yet effective choice of costumes.

Michel Gondry uses very long takes in this music video which goes against the standard codes and conventions of a music video, the long takes work very well. Gondry used this technique because "I was sick to see choreography being mistreated in videos like filler with fast cutting and fast editing, really shallow. I don't think choreography should be shot in close-ups." SOURCED FROM WIKIPEDIA

Daft Punk created the soundtrack for Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010) and they even made a cameo appearence in the film.

The target audience of the music video is 15-24 due to the genre being electronic, the song will be heard in clubs, parties etc therefore aiming the video at that age range will work well. The dancing alone signifies the genre, also no instruments which can also do the same.



This video below is another Daft Punk song however it shows how effective Digitisation is, the video has 7 million views (which could be classed as a viral video) on Youtube. It shows with a low budget and talent you can create something millions will watch, and it is achieveable because of Digitisation.