"Shakira - Sale El Sol" Deconstruction

Performance scene at start of video

Performance scene at end of video

The theme of this music video is very similar (despite the big genre difference) to the Avenged Sevenfold - Afterlife video that I have previously deconstructed, in the form of the contrast of dark and light, as the first half of the music video features dark clothing and dark lighting, whereas towards the end it gets lighter and lighter. This contrast theme is continued by the fact that it's snowing at start of video and is sunny at the end, which relates to the Spanish lyrics of the song and the actual song title: "Sale el sol - The Sun Comes Out" Although this song is written in Spanish, the fact that it's on Shakira's bilingual album of the same name (Sale El Sol) means that this video is also aimed at an English audience, which could explain why there is no narrative dialogue. An interesting point is that on may occasions when Shakira releases a single there are often two music videos released, one with the Spanish version of the song and one with the English version; see Gitana and Gypsy. This helps the music video to reach a wider audience.

Close up of acoustic guitar

On two occasions in a short period of time there is a close up of the acoustic guitar (1:08 and 1:16), this is because it is the only instrument (besides a slight electric guitar) playing, focusing on the main instrument in a particular section of a track, such as a guitar, drum or bass solo is a common convention of music videos. During the bridge of video there is a lot of fast cross cutting (2:49), this is because of the slightly more aggressive sound to the music in the bridge section. There is also big lighting change after the bridge at 3:01 and to fit in with this Shakira literally tears out of her dark clothing. There isn't much narrative involved in the video, the only separate scenario from the performance is Shakira running through a maze of hallways in a gold dress, this relates to the performance as it is clearly in the same setting, as you can see towards the end of the video that the walls are the same in both scenarios, as well as the fact that the lighting (the sun coming up) changes in both at the same time. Having the main focus of the performance side to be the vocalist is a very common convention in music videos of all genres, but especially pop videos, and this is displayed here through the frequent use of close up/ medium close up shots of Shakira throughout the video.

Heavy use of bright colours