Motion Video Critique #4

Hospital from Matt Dempsey on Vimeo.


This time I decided to critique something that is, unfortunately, not really successful. Or, to be honest unsuccessful. This is a video that visualizes a not very well recorded song called "Take Me to the Hospital"
On the 5th second when letters start to appear, their alignment seems awkward and disproportional. Hierarchy is not very clear. For example placement of the word "hand" does not seem to be correct for the hierarchy purpose. The word "its" is placed into a frame, which doesn't seem to be supported by the song. So it is not clear why the author did it. The word "shaking" along with an arrow and a literally shaking "its" creates a strange and too literal combination. There is not forced connection, no mystery, no interest.

On the 10th second when "To The" appears, it looks like letters were stretched manually. It is not visually pleasing, and looks plain odd. On the second 11 the frames are rotated and the previous frame is squished on top of the screen. Doctor is manually squished than followed by a consequent frames of pictorial images that symbolize doctors and fixing the patient. They are plain and not entertaining in any way.

On the second 21 there are two pictorial images that talk about ambulance costing too much. Again, it is too literal, boring and the placement is very awkward. The black screen slides down and it splits the screen in the middle.

On the 27th second there is a landscape image, and an ambulance car that is going through. The color scheme is not working and it stays on the screen or too long. Typographic treatment is awkward again and poorly placed.

So, this is a poorly done video. Clearly the author did not place too much efforts into his typographic placements, alignments, color scheme, and most importantly, the concept.