Textual Analysis of Music Videos

I chose Fall Out Boys -  'A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More "Touch Me"', it was released on July 6th in 2006 and was directed by Alan Ferguson. The genre of Fall Out Boy is pop punk/alternative rock/pop rock and this attributes to their style of music videos - they are mainly narrative based with clips of themselves preforming in. They are quite a well established band and as this song is taken from their third album they do not use full performance videos. Alan Ferguson has become a frequent directer for several of Fall Out Boys music videos and did 'Dance Dance' which is from the same album and also has a similar feel to this video. Other videos for Fall Out Boy include, 'This Ain't A Scene', 'Thnks Fr Th Mmrs' and 'I'm Like A Lawyer With The Way I'm Always Trying To Get You Off (Me  & You)'.


The relationship between the lyrics and the visuals is not very clear, the video features vampires, while the lyrics tell a story about a boy who's girlfriend left him, the boy wants her back and so sleeps outside her house. He thinks she is too good for him and so he's a lost cause and should be written off. This is not the case of what happens in the video.
The music and the visuals compliment each other well, as the video is more like a short film at about 7 minutes long, while the song is only 2:48 it includes a lot of pauses of the music and then short acting parts and a fight scene. While the music is playing you can hear little diegetic noises in the background, e.g a garage door opening and several banging noises.
Throughout there are close ups of the band playing their instruments and acting out their parts, bassist Pete Wentz is the main character and so he has the most close ups and the most interesting role. When there is a fight scene and they roll up the music changes to a drum beat and a bass line running through while a build up to mayhem is happening. Then the main song breaks through.
 Fall Out Boys motif of a kind of bat drawn by Wentz and it is used a few times in the video on a car bonnet and on a bass guitar. The clips of the band as themselves playing are quite short which suggest the record company are showing a storyline rather than the actual band, but by still having them involved for a lot of it. It makes the band seem really fun and amusing, but in a dark way as the video is a little Gothic. It is based on several old vampire films such as Blade and the introduction is based on the film The Lost Boys. Even the name of the song features an intertexual reference 'Sixteen Candles' is a film from the 80s featuring Molly Ringwald . 
The video also features several cameos from other bands who are also friends of Fall Out Boy, this includes:   William Beckett & Mike Carden from The Academy Is..., Brendon Urie & Spencer Smith from Panic! At the Disco and Travis McCoy from Gym Class Heroes.


A majority of the video is narrative with a story of Pete being a vampire and making friends with some humans who train him up to kill the vampire who created him. This all ends with a vampire war and some dramatic music, then it turns out all the cops are also vampires and don't like Pete so cart him off in a cop car, it then ends in a cliffhanger. As I have mentioned before the band themselves play all the main parts and are preforming the song in a basement/warehouse area by themselves. 
I think it's  a very good music video and shows the band aren't afraid to take risks, it leaves the audience wanting more and it looks like a clip from a movie. It's quite a neutral video as it can be aimed at either males or females, though a majority of the characters are male.