Nervous Breakdown by Hawthorne Heights
Here’s my inner 15 year old emo child, loving this song, this clip and thinking that every word sung like totally connects with all my life events, and all my emotions, you know?
It’s a cute clip. Very well done though both the storyline and the imagery have been pounded to death, it’s a great example of knowing your audience and your target market. Which is not to say that Hawthorne Heights don’t legitimately enjoy skeletons themselves and I certainly hope that they haven’t made this video purely to satisfy what some studio exec thinks he knows about teenagers these days. But the underdog/outcast wanting more storyline, mixed with non-threatening, vaguely gothic imagery is so easy to relate to and essentially, what the kids want to see.
The animation is incredibly sweet and to be honest, my only real beef (aside from that cheesy, cheesy ending that I’m choosing to ignore) is the shots of the band’s heads in boxes. The green screen is done so well that in the body shots of the band, we’re not taken out of the story too much because they’re skeletons mix in with the others, even if their faces are different. But having those heads, painted with Halloween make up, right up alongside the animated skeletons of the story, I think it draws away from the viewers immersion into the skeletal factory world.
