Panic At The Disco - I Write Sins Not Tragedies

I have decided to analyse this music video as we used it for inspiration earlier on in the project. The video is concept based and quite abstract. It's a great music video to analyse. There is a sense of a narrative and also some very convincing performance.


The video starts off with a normal situation - a wedding. The main performers is dressed in a red suit and holds a black stick and may represent some sort of a circus instructor. Pretty soon into the video we begin to see the quirky and weirder side to the video. Quite early on some performers who resemble circus performers but who are all quite strange and some creepy characters. They all seem to dance quite theatrically and sometimes aggressively. The main performer begins to direct his anger towards the groom. Finally he drags him outside where he witnesses the bride kissing another man. At this point there is a transition and the groom is now in the outift the main performer was originally wearing. This may represent a shift in his knowledge and awareness. Now that his eyes have been opened, he is no longer ignorant or in the dark. The whole narrative and concept matches the lyrics as can be seen with the line 'It's much better to face these kinds of things...' and whole idea of revealing the truth to the groom.


At 0:28 we are introduced to the quirkiness of the video with the wedding guests with white painted faces.


0:31 This is a really creepy shot where the quests simultaneously look at the camera.


0:36 Editing to the music (Andrew Goodwin) is visible here. As the beat kicks in the main performer smashes the door open and suddenly many strange character enter the room. So it signiifes the entrance of these weird, almost surreal characters.


0:41 Weird aspect of the video. These strange characters are juxtaposed with a normal, worldly situation.

1:00 Here the visuals match the music. As the music gets quieter the mad characters also calm down and sit down at this point.


1:15 We took major inspiration from this shot as the make-up is successfully extremely creepy. We decided to use the big red grin on our masked person. The white mask creates a similar effect to that of the white painted face.


1:28 This is another shot we took much inspiration from as we used a similar shot with the masked person blowing glitter out of her hand. In our video, this can be seen to symbolise the masked person's attempt to win over the main girl or equally it could be seen to represent the power of the masked person, or the part of the girl's self that it represents, and effectively the hold it has over the girl.


1:30 This shot is quite disturbing. I particularly like how make-up has been used to make the audience feel uneasy.


1.38 Over exposure this shot goes really bright. We tried experimenting with lighting and over exposure in our video.


1.43 - At this point the shot goues blurry and slightly out of focus. We have tried experimenting with focus and I think the blurry effect is effective in making the audience lost and confused.


1.45 - LA shot kicks towards the camera shows that he holds the power. Again, aimilarities can be drawn between this aspect in this video and ours, in which the main girl struggles to maintain the power against the masked person. In the tunnel, there are particular shots where the main girl sings into the camera and seems to be fighting hard to regain her power as can be seen in her facial expression.


The section after this is all edited to the beat and is again the visuals match the music. In this part of the sonag, people are dancing and being aggressive as can be seen on their facial expressions. There are random flashes at for instance 1:53 and this is something we could try to as there is a running theme of light in our video.


Hand held camera creates a sense of disorientation. This is evident at 1.55. We have tried to create something similar in some shots in the forest.

3:02 Fire is another link between our video and this video as we have used fire spinning in ours. We also have a shot where the fire almost blows upwards and this matches the music and beat in ours.