Music Video Conventions

Different styles of music videos:

Performance- videos where the band/artist is playing the song.

Narrative- There is a story line in the video.

Mixture- A video containing both performance and narrative features.

Cameo- similar to narrative except the band features rather than actors.

Camera shots of a music video:

Most videos will use a variety of Long shots, close ups and mid shots, including such shots allows emphasis to be placed on instruments and shots of the band if its a performance video but may also help to show emotion.

The lyrics and the visuals presented in the song tend to have a connection. Normally for pop videos the lyrics and music are about love and relationships and so will show this in the video.

Sometimes the visuals may also match the beat of the song through editing, so perhaps the shiy changes by each beat of the drum or something similar.

The length of a music video ranges from around 3-5 minutes

Andrew Goodwin identified key features of music videos:

1. Music videos demonstrate certain characteristics for different genres.

2. There is a relationship between music and visuals.

3. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals.

4.The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close-ups of the artist

5. the artist may develop motifs or iconography that recur across their work

6. There is frequent reference to the notion of 'looking' (screens within screens, filming, cameras) and particularly voyeuristic (pleasure through looking) treatment of the female body.

7. There are often intertextual references- mostly to film, television and popular culture.

I think that these key features will be particularly useful for our video, particularly features 1, 2, 3 and 4 as with 2 and 3 this should keep the song and video linked and will help us to make sure we accurately emphasise the meaning of the song whilst also making sure it fits with the tone of the song. I think we should bear in mind feature 1 when planning to make sure we do not stray from the audiences expectations, as we want the video to be a natural extension of the song not something that is random or particularly stands apart from the song. I feel the same towards feature 4 as it must also be remembered that a music video is mainly there to sell the band and song and so arguably one of the most important things to maintain is showing the audience the band.