Here’s how they stack up against each other and what each one tells us about who these boys are now that they’ve spent some time apart. (Harry and Zayn have each released two.) And there are some very clear winners and losers among them. Now that Louis Tomlinson has dropped his first solo album, every former One Direction member has released at least one solo project. Their solo albums, good or bad, reveal how each individual wants to reintroduce themselves to the public, and how they’re attempting the complicated leap from adolescent pop star to independent adult artist. It’s the first time any of them have recorded without each other, and the first time they’ve performed solo in front of an audience since being on The X Factor as teens. That is, until Zayn left the group in 2015 to embark on a solo career, and, a year later, the remaining band members announced an “indefinite hiatus.”įour years after One Direction announced its hiatus, each of the One Direction-ers have begun their own solo careers. Sam Ruttyn/Newspix/Getty Imagesįor those five years, the One Direction boys seemed like they were untouchable. This photo of One Direction from 2012 illustrates exactly just how fast the night changes. And Louis? Hmm, well - Louis was also there. Zayn was quietly mysterious, while Liam was extroverted and jockish. Thanks to their individual quirks and calculated branding ploys, each boy quickly became an archetype for a different high school crush: Niall was the adorable friend, Harry the artistic boy next door. Over a span of five years, the group released five albums, did four world tours, broke numerous Billboard 100 music records (including ones previously only held by the Beatles), recorded a documentary, and even released a perfume.Īt the same time, the five members also became the basis of adolescent crushes and fervor for many years to come.
While the group only placed third on The X Factor, their time on the reality show was just the beginning of their global takeover.
After auditioning as individual singers on the British musical competition The X Factor, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik were thrown together into a group by TV personality Simon Cowell in 2010. Whereas the camera often zooms in and out on the 'present day' band, often either side of the black and white clips, I think this is symbolic of perspective and the zooming in/out is the director changing out perspective on the band - hence why it comes before and after.A decade - yes, a decade - ago, a teenage boy band by the name of One Direction was formed. On the majority of the shots of 'the past,' the camera stays pretty still as if it is just an observation - somebody looking in on/at One Direction and their career.
The second technical code that is a use of Binary Oppositions is the use of the camera. Because of the dullness of the black and white filter, when the shot moves back to the boys singing to us, it feels almost more fresh, the colour seems brighter and it just generally feels more in the moment and more pleasant. A mixed bag of emotions and, regardless of how they feel about it, knowing that everything is going to be different now One Direction is finished. In colour theory, black is evil and white is good, the use of the filter could be a message of the mixed emotions about One direction and it being over. The music video uses black and white to show to make the old clips stand out more and really bring home that change between then and now. The first of which being the use of colour, or therefore lack of. Either way, the use of black and white makes the rational "Directioner" emotional.īinary Oppositions are used in this music video through the technical codes. I say unspecified because some viewers will find the "throwback" shots happy and a celebration of their 5 years together and others will find them sad and a sign these times weren't the happy times they seemed to be.
The use of black and white is an intentional move from the directors in order to, not only differentiate between the past and present but also to, provoke an unspecified emotion in the audience. Between Niall's vocal and shot dominance takeover, there is more clips of the boys in Black and White. For fans that have followed them from the beginning, just these few seconds of shots will have given them an extreme feeling of nostalgia - setting the tone for the rest of the video.
The rest of the first 17 seconds flip between a modern day (at the time) Harry singing into the camera and the series of events that followed it, them finding out they have been put together and their first hug as a band. The opening shot, a black and white clip of the original 5 members stranding on the X Factor stage waiting to find out whether or not they're about to become a band.