A2 Media Studies: June 2016

Vernallis

Narrative - is a free thing in music videos, it is not controlled or tame. In a music video there can be a story or there cannot be - but there is still a narrative being portrayed. The story can be fragmented, the whole story is not needed; it can be the beginning, the middle or the end. Just a snapshot provides a narrative.

Editing - unlike in a film, continuity editing does not matter, the rules of editing in a film do not stand in a music video. E.g you can break the 180 degree rule.

Camera - Movements and framing are key features to a music video. There are certain shots that just have to happen, an establishing shot, master shots, close ups. Camera can be used to change the pace.

Diegesis - creating a world within the music video. That world can be realistic (like the one we live in) or unrealistic (a fantasy place).

We were given the task of listening to a piece of music, called Solsbury Hill, without seeing the music video and were asked to guess what the music video would be like. We shared many ideas in the class.

Andrew Goodwin

Six Concepts of a Music Video

1) Does the visual match to the lyrics or do they contradict or even amplify the message?

2) Thought Beats

3) Genre related style and iconography presented

4) Multiple close ups of main artist

5) Voyeurism

6) Intertextual Reference

Representation in a Music Video

Voyeurism - (Freud) erotic pleasure can be gained by looking at a sexual object (preferably when the object is unaware of being watched).

Male Gaze - Laura Mulvey 1975 proposed that because filmmakers are predominantly male the presence of women is often for the purposes of display (rather than narrative).

Exhibitionism - Female performers being at once sexually provocative and apparently in control of and inviting a sexualised gaze in what could be termed as the opposite of voyeurism.

Raunch Culture - Andrea Levy (from her book Female Chaivnist Pigs) makes the argument of raunch culture where women are made to see themselves as objects and see sex as their only source of power.

Female Gaze - a Gaze trope, work is presented as from a female perspective or reflects female attitudes, either because of the creator's gender or because it is deliberately aimed at a female audience

Homosexuality - Although lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals are generally indistinguishable from their straight or transgender counterparts, media depictions of LGBT individuals often represent them as visibly and behaviorally different.

Strong dominant female - being everything a male stereotype is.