Conventions in popular music videos

Technical conventions

• Band shots, whole band shots and perfomance clips
• Shadows, mise-en-scene reflects atmoshere, equal division of shots upon band members or focus on key members
• Highlighting, brightlighting
• High angle/low angle, special lighting effects
• Close ups/extreme close ups
• Animation and video special effects (e.g. CGI, Green Screen, etc)
• Colour effects - more monochrome/black and white

Narrative

• How is narrative use? Balanced with performance? Cut into performance? Merged with the performance?
• Narrative - does is AMPLIFY the lyrics? Or does it focus on a specific part of the lyric and ILLUSTRATE it? Or does it CONTRADICT the lyrics?
• Remember that narrative may not be constructed in a traditions manner - may be partial/disjointed - e.g. use of montage

Intertextuality

• This refers to the process where on media text may take ideas from another existing text - it may be a carbon copt, a pastiche, a parody or a homage - e.g. a music video may borrow elements from a well known film
• This is 'borrowing' of images, narratives, etc and reconstructing them can be seen as 'post-modern'
• It draws the audience into text - they recognise elements - they're 'in on the secret'

Representation

• Glamour/popstyle lifestyle
• Playing out 'popstar' lifestyle within video
• mean and moody men
• Seductive poses from female artists
• Anti-establishment activity
• Deserted locations and straight forward narratives
• Guitar solos
• All playing to the audience
• Short skirts
• Cleavage
• Trying to portay a certain image - intertextuality
• Voyeurism (people watching other people when they don't know)
• Urban locations
• Dancing
• Crowd shots
• Destroyed enviroments