RS - Deconstruction - Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity

Artist: Jamiroquai

Song Title : Virtual Insanity

Year: 1996

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Audience: 15-24

Genre: Acid Jazz/Funk

Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" is a concept music video. The music video is very simple and only has five shots however it has won awards for "Best Video of the Year" and "Breakthrough Video" showing simplicity is the answer. Basically the music video consists of frontman Jay Kay dancing and performing the song to the camera by lip syncing.

The video only contains 5 shots and therefore with it being a 4 min long song the clips are very long. This music video challenges the codes and conventions of a typical music video because it does not have very fast takes and hundreds of shots, it has shots lasting a minute and only 5 in total however with the awards it has won, it definatley works for the audience!



The music video is clever because of the special effects it uses within it. The room appears to stay still whilst the floor appears to move and allows Jay Kay to dance around the room with a sort of treadmill effect. Special effects are also used when it transitions to the next shot (not very often). The camera tilts up or down for a few seconds and then returns to a central point before the next shot/location is on screen.

The whole band do appear in the music video however only for about 20 seconds, therefore this music video takes another typical code and convention of a music video by focusing pretty much entirely on the frontman. Jay Kay is in everyshot and for about 95% of the music video whilst the other band members are in it for only 1 shot. Therefore it does have some typical codes and conventions of a typical music video.

There are very short clips of cockroaches and crows flying as a bit to fill in when it changes to another scene. It's sort of a cross cut in between 2 scenes only lasting a second or 2. The dancing is typical for the genre of the song, therefore yet again it does take aspects of a typical music video and applies to the codes and conventions of a music video within that genre.

Lip-syncing and dancing are the major parts for this music video. The dance has been choreographed perfectly and with the shots being very long it would have taken a long time to get the dancing right in one take. Lip-syncing is used for the performance side of the music video for verisimilitude. The planning for this music video would be vast so if we wanted to do anything like this it would take weeks to plan all the choreography and have the long takes.