Music video theory lesson notes.

Andrew Goodwin

• Thought beats.
• Narrative and performance.
• The star image.
• Relation of visuals to song.
• Technical aspects of a music video.

Songs fail to give us the complete narrative!

Music videos are repeated a lot, but the combination of the music and the video stops the song from seeming so repetitive due to the video.

Illustrate (Uses a set of images to illustrate the song - most common)

Amplify (Effect of the video being made bigger)

Disjuncture (Meaning of song is completely ignored/ video juxtaposes the song & lyrics... Gets people talking about the video)


Image:

In this video. Lady Gaga's image is very important. This is because the fact that this is one of Lady Gaga's first videos. This means that Gaga was trying to show the audience watching the video what kind of an artist she was going to be though this video. She wanted to show her personality and to show her uniqueness though her image and outfits portrayed in this video.

Techincal Aspects:


This is a performance video with some narrative. 

Camera:

• Intentional camera movements.
• Use of focus. (Low focus and sharp focus variation) 

Mise En Scene:

• Use of costume that reflects the genre.
• Uses a lot of iconography to show the genre of music and to portray the meaning of the song. 

Editing:

• Fast cuts in time with music.
• Transitions used to look like lighting effects. (Eg. sunlight glares.)