Blog 15 (Video Observation)

Livin' La Vida Loca by Ricky MartinSingle from Ricky Martin Album

The video starts with a car crashing into a fire hydrant and water splattering all over the place. The street is dark. The whole video is dark for the most part. When the scenes show the city streets then the only lights are the car lights and the street lights. In the club scenes the light comes from the stage lights shining on the stage, the stage’s background, the spot light, and the strobe lights. These lights help the viewer to see the subject matter but still give the dark lighting affect to the video.

The camera angle is mostly from straight on or it is on by the ground and focuses up at its subject matter. The camera pans a lot and zooms in slightly sometimes. The camera also pans and zooms out a lot. The camera seems to constantly be in motion. If the camera is not panning then the scene is cutting in and out. The camera hardly ever is positioned from an upward angle and focuses down on the subject. The main time the camera is positioned up high is when it focuses on the girls dancing in the rain. Another time the camera is focused on a girl dancing on a pillar or balcony, but then the foreground becomes blurry and the background comes into focus. When the background comes into focus the camera is angled down at Ricky Martin. The camera never actually changes its angle from straight on the girl on the balcony, but by changing the focus of something up high it focuses on a subject down low.

When the video is transitioning from one scene to another it does it a few ways. One way the scene makes a transition is by zooming in or out on an object. At one point the video zooms in on the reflection in Martin’s eye, but the reflection is not a reflection of his sight but a different scene. Another example of this is a fire hydrant is knocked towards the screen and the camera zooms in on the black hole at the end of the hydrant and when it zooms out it is zooming out of the hole of a trumpet. At other times one object in the screen stays in focus while the background blurs and when the background clears a new scene is present. For this technique the camera usually focuses on Martin.