Written In The Stars – Tinie Tempah ft. Eric Turner – 9 Frame Analysis

This is one of the first scenes in the video. It shows Eric Turner, one of the artists, playing the piano using a long shot. This type of shot is used regularly in music videos as it can show the talent of the musicians and not just them singing for the whole song. The instrument that he is playing matches up with the start of the songs and makes it look like he is playing along with it and singing his part for this part of the song. It is a good shot to use because it means that the audience can see both the artist and some of the instruments used in the song, which is important for some groups within the music audience.

The second shot shows the main artist, Tinie Tempah, on a rooftop singing his part of the song and dancing along to it at the same time. This is also a big part of a lot of music videos as it uses lip-syncing. This is a very important part of music videos as it means people can use this as a means of seeing their favourite artists ‘performing’ their tracks. In this instance the artist is very into the song and is dancing too, which shows that he is a natural performer. The mise-en-scene that you can see here shows a skyline probably from a city like London or New York. This could match up to the song title, Written In The Stars, as he and Eric Turner, the other artist, keep looking upwards towards the sky which could amplify the meaning of the song.

The next scene is a young boy, who we assume is used to represent Tinie as a younger person and showed some of the things that he may have went through as a child. This adds meaning to the song and reflects the idea that the song represents that everything is already written and that everything happens for a reason. At this point in the video the young child has just been made to sit outside because his mother has just taken a man inside the house. This matches up with the line at the time which was “have you ever been so hungry it keeps you awake”, which portrays the meaning that when he was younger his family was poor and we can now see that the man who was going in was there for sex. The mise-en-scene here shows the young boy sat near a chain link fence. This could represent the way that the family was trapped in the way that the mother had to sell herself just to feed them both for a few days.

In this shot we see Tinie Tempah dancing around again but this time it seems more uniform as it is in sync with the music, at the point when the photo above was taken the music is just going to the chorus, so he uses a sort of fist pump to emphasize the raise of the sound going into the chorus, again you see the skyscrapers which could emphasize that now he has grown up he has money to pay for his food etc. and is uplifted.

In this shot Tinie illustrates the lyrics by doing what they say on the screen. The lyric is “I wasn’t going nowhere, running man” and his actions show this. He is running on the spot, meaning that he is trying to move forward but can’t because there is always going to be something holding him back. This could give extra meaning to the song, that even though everything happens for a reason, the things that you’ve left behind can always catch up with you.

This is your typical meat shot. It shows the artist close up and sort of advertises them as a brand. You can see in this shot his attributes as a performer as he is using his body language to get the message of the song across and is matching up these actions to the lyrics being sung at the time. You can also see his clean cut shave and hair cut and diamond earing which show that he has came from poverty i.e. when he was that small child sat outside and has now grown into being a famous star on the TV. This shows that even though it may have looked bad for him at the time, things that are written to happen will, no matter how hard it will be.

This shot shows the audience Tinie as a boy again, and flicks between him now and then. This shows that even though financially and socially he has become better and more mature he still views himself as the small boy that he was before. We see in other shots the boy writing lyrics in a notepad while listening to a CD, showing that he was eager to be a star from when he was very young and wanted to get him and his mother out of the situation that they were in and into a better place for both of them.

This is towards the back-end of the video and it shows him playing an air guitar along to the song, which at that point has the guitar solo in it. This goes along with the music and to some extent shows sound beats and shows Tinie as a musician and not just a singer, which is what it seems throughout the video as we only see him singing and moving. In the background we can see the sun is ready to set so it is coming towards the end of the video and is coming to the end of the story that Tempah and Turner have been trying to get across in the whole song.

This is the shot at the very end of the video and you can see that it is the young boy as well. He seems to be performing a crescendo as if to show that the video is ending. The lyrics at the time are talking about a message and the cuts between the shot above and another shot that shows Tinie as a man, as if he is trying to tell the younger version of himself that even though some of the things seem bleak at that moment in his life things will get better and eventually he will become this big hip-hop artist who sends his music out to millions and can get messages and stories out to those people.