http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9uSyICrtow

The music video for 30 Seconds to Mars’ song ‘Up in the Air’ is visually exciting and intense, matching the beats and rhythm of the song. It is highly cinematic with bursts of vibrant colour, interesting framing and editing choices.

The music video, directed by Jared Leto under his pseudonym ‘Bartholomew Cubbins’ is yet another masterpiece to his film roll. The video highlights ‘circus’ or ‘freak-show’ type characters set against an industrial background. A woman in doll-like makeup is set against a coloured dot print background resembling the band’s album cover. A different woman with bright pink hair is surrounded by orange butterflies while a young female gymnast performs aerial tricks with pink powdered paint. Dita von Tesse even makes an appearance on a pink mechanical bull. Pink and blue stand out as being the most commonly used colours in this video.

The titles ‘Love’, ‘Lust’, ‘Faith’, and ‘Dreams’ appear separately, each with different symbols representing each. Leto uses a lot of symmetry in his video, and most notably in this one. Most objects or people are framed in the center, in one frame he is standing between twins, and in another two groups of people charging towards each other is shown in a long shot – highlighting the symmetry.

The motions made by the characters or even simple objects always hit the beat of the music, emphasizing the music as being an integral part to the video experience. If he doesn’t use the motion made by characters to emphasize the musical changes, he does so by editing between different shots of the same image (ie; zooming out) or between images.

Towards the middle of the video, Leto incorporates isolating a movement and repeating it to highlight the repeated words ‘today’. During the drum solo, the movement of the images and editing between them sows down considerably, giving the audience the feeling of anticipation of what will happen next. After this section, a tape with Morse code spells out M-A-R-S (no text is shown so only those who researched would know) and the video rewinds quickly. After this ‘take no more’ is accompanied by vision of two groups of people running towards each other, throwing powdered paint at one another. The ‘paint war’ is visually effective as various colours are used and the vision is shown in slow-motion to highlight the contrast against competing colours.

My favourite editing sequence comes at 5:40 when the female gymnast shot in profile flips,which turns into a man on a Pogo stick flipping in the same direction, back to the gymnast completing her flip. Then slow motion of Jared dancing which turns into him jumping onto the drum set Shannon is playing, then back to the paint fight. The comparison of motion is effective and interesting.

The band also sent their song ‘Up in the Air’, literally up into the air. The single was received at a space station by an astronaut, probably the coolest thing the band has done (although everything they do is uber-cool).