Pantera – 5 Minutes Alone

The music video is kept in a really dense, dark atmosphere with a lot of close-ups and detail shots that allow the viewer to feel the closeness of each action, almost like he was being inside it. It creates a sense of intimacy for the viewer and builds a relationship between the artist and fan which after watching such kind of video might be more likely to reflect on the atmosphere and understand lyrics of it better. The often demand of the record companies to show a lot of close-ups of the main artist could be a suggestion here. However, it is quite common for Pantera’s music videos to be focused on the performance of the band which in this case makes up almost the entire video. It is very powerful and has strong emphasis on any sort of movement. The guitar close-ups, recorded at a variety of angles are very important in this audio-visual, showing enhancing the power of their groove metal.

The editing and mise-en-scene took a big part in creating that dynamic fell of this video as well. Fast cut montage is used here extensively, especially in parts when the track is simply quicker and more energetic. In those particular bits of this video audio and visual are working perfectly because the quick montage, often enhanced by the flashing light create such fast and intriguing atmosphere it is hard to stop watching the video even if you are not a fan of this type of music. The often blending of shot into the

next one creates the sense of continuity, very important in this six minute video. It is well mixed with the fast cut scenes mentioned before and extends the range of camerawork in this video which makes it more engaging.

The video and band itself are a very good example of heavy metal genre style. The obscure/dark atmosphere is typical for heavy metal music videos, for example, in this video, the background is pitch black almost throughout the whole video. It is almost entirely made of the performance shots

what is also quite common for videos of this genre. Apart from the vocalist, all of the band members have very long hair – another connotation to rock/heavy metal culture.

We feel inspired by the camerawork, editing and mise-en-scene of this video and are planning to include few ideas from it in our project. Our plan is also to create a long, six minutes video and ‘5 Minutes Alone’ gives us a lot of instruction on how to keep it. We have decided that we will definitely use a lot of shot-to-shot blending in our music video and we will try our best to achieve ‘5 Minutes Alone’ quality in this particular part of editing. Also, we planned to use a lot of guitar close-ups in our audio-visual and this video shows the variety of angles when recording such shots so it will definitely be helpful.

Top: Close-up of the vocalist, bottom: detail shot of the guitar

Multiple blending of shots