Textual Analysis 3

By analysing the contents of this music video we can see there are conventions for this genre of music. Generally this style of music will have a lack of lip synching and direct eye contact with the camera. I believe that they lack this direct contact because it is a convention of pop music, like One Direction's "What Makes You Beautiful" and Jessie J's "Price Tag". It seems like this particular genre is trying to avoid being a pop genre, and trying to be different to the pop music videos. From analysis of this music video and watching others more generally another convention is to have a story behind the video, for example in this they are having fun and falling in love. However this genre seem to do this slightly differently to other videos, for example performance style videos still have a story behind them usually where the artist is portraying the overall feel of the song. Although in a Narrative style video, like this, there is usually parts of no lip synching where other characters will run alongside the song to tell a story.

The cuts in the music video seem to work with the beats of the song. At the start of the video the music is quite slow and therefore so are the cuts, as the song builds momentum the cuts become faster and the clips become shorter. Also the start of the video is quite dull and dark lighting wise, whereas as the song builds momentum the sun comes out and the lighting is much brighter. This is something we would wish to achieve in our music video because it seems to have more continuity if the cuts match with the song. Our song seems to stay at the same level all the time and therefore we may not be able to reciprocate the cuts becoming faster when the song is faster.

Another convention I have established in narrative music videos is that although the song is only a couple of minutes long, the story lasts a longer length of time. For instance this one seems to be a whole day or a few hours with the characters. For our music video we hope to create the time frame of a year or two which is longer than this particular video does but is similar to other videos we have seen.

We have learnt a lot from this music video, we feel that the narrative characters acting out a story alongside the artist performing the song works well. However we would only use one story-line to run alongside it because if we had three like this example, it could become difficult to film as there will be a lot of organising of talent and we would need to spend a large amount of time on the filming of our video in order for it to work. So we would only have one set of characters that are continued throughout the whole video. Most importantly this music video showed us that you do not have to include lip synching throughout the whole video in order for it to be successful. Throughout the whole 4 minute video the artist only appears for roughly 30 seconds of it. This is becoming a convention of this style of music and is something we wish to reciprocate in our own music video