Andrew Goodwin, a media theorist, has identified 6 key features of music videos that can be easily recognised by us as an audience throughout the different genres of music, even if we tend not to think about it...
1. Music videos demonstrate the quintessential characteristics of the genre being heard.
This means that the style of music will not contradict what is being seen in the music video. For example, a boy/girl band might include a dance routine of some kind in their music video, whereas a rock band's music video would probably show them performing on their instruments.
Pop boy-band One Direction dancing in 'Best Song Ever'.
Rock band Muse playing instruments in 'Uprising'.
2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals.
This means that the visuals of the music video should reflect the music by either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.
'Man on a Wire' by The Script has the lead singer on a wire.
3. There is a relationship between music and visuals.
This means that the style and atmosphere of the music should affect what we see in the visuals.
'Jar of Hearts' by Christina Perri is a very sombre and dark sounding song which is reflected in the dull and gloomy atmosphere in the video.
4. The demands of the record label will be incorporated into the music video.
This means that the music video is likely to have lots of close-ups of the artist to promote them and make them more recognisable. In addition to this, the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work to give them a visual style, which the record label can use to create their star image.
In Ellie Goulding's 'Burn', there are many close-ups of her face to gain familiarity.
5. There are constant references to the notion of looking.
During the music video, we will see the artist in a variety of ways, this may be through screens within screens or in mirrors. This will be more likely to be used by synthetic artists where voyeurism can cause the focus to be on the artist.
In 'Telephone' by Lady Gaga we can see her through a security camera in her underwear to add sex appeal.
6. There will often be intertextual references.
This is where the music video will imitate other media products such as films, television programmes or other music videos.
The puppet section from 'Walks Like Rihanna' by The Wanted (left) mimics that in 'N Sync's 'Bye Bye Bye' (right).
We created a focus group in our class to get feedback on what people thought of our thriller opening sequence. We were especially keen to find out what they liked and disliked about it, whether they found the narrative to be believable and what they thought of the acting.
We found that they mainly thought that the film was good and believable and were also impressed with the additional sounds we added (such as the phone ringing which became louder as it was removed from the dead body's coat) as we had to remove the audio (due to the background noise).
However, the negative reactions were that the lip syncing was a bit out of time, the acting wasn't as good as it could have been and too much information was revealed in such a short space of time too early into the film - although we justified this with the point that it is a fast-pace action film which is supposed to get straight into the action.
Overall, we felt that the feedback was fair and reflective of our film. If we could change anything, we would have used a boom microphone to record a better sound at the time of our thriller's filming to prevent any background noise so we wouldn't have had to record the lines again and wouldn't have had to try to sync the audio of the characters talking with their lip movements.
Although in my prelim we included a large range of shots (wide shots, medium shots, over-the-shoulder shots, high angle shots and low angle shots), they were all fixed shots and so were overall more basic than those that we used in our thriller. In addition to all these shots (minus the over-the-shoulder shots because there was no face-to-face conversation), our thriller also included a panning shot, a circular tracking shot and a zooming shot. This all created movement which emphasises the action aspect of the film. However, my prelim did have a tiny bit of movement, but this was unintentional shakiness of the camera, even though it was on a tripod. After watching our final thriller, I can see that the camerawork has been improved since the filming of the prelim as any camera movement in the thriller was intentional and so we have become more confident in using the camera as it was the first time using it for the prelim for most of us.
Thriller
Prelim
Mise-en-scène:
For our prelim, the costumes were just the clothes that the actors were wearing on the day and didn't mean anything in accordance to what was going on. In contrast, for our thriller, our intention was for Sean and the victim to wear casual clothes to make them more realistic and show that they are just average people and for Sebastian to wear black leather gloves to hide his identity. We also had no props for the prelim, whereas our thriller required props such as the phones so Sean and Sebastian could have their conversation. The lighting for the prelim just came from the light in the room and the light coming through the windows, but for our thriller we had planned the lighting for Sebastian very carefully to connote his mystery and danger. In addition, the location of the prelim was just a classroom as it was not pre-planned. However, even though the location for Sean in our thriller changed from where it was planned to be, it was still outside and helped connote the disturbed nature of what was happening, and the location for Sebastian did not change as it allowed us to use the lighting that we wanted. All of this shows that we had thought a lot more about the mise-en-scène for our thriller as we were more prepared and so this meant that whereas the mise-en-scène for the prelim was random and had no significance, the mise-en-scène for our thriller was able to have meaning.
Prelim
Thriller
Editing:
In the prelim, the only editing I did was to cut the footage into clips and place them in order to follow the storyboard as best as I could. In comparison, for our thriller we did cut down the footage, cut it into clips and put them in the order we wanted, but we also edited the clips themselves to make the thriller look more cinematic. Lip-syncing the audio was also a way in which we edited our thriller, however I will go into this in more detail when talking about sound. In addition, the prelim doesn't seem to flow as well as the thriller does because we didn't film enough footage for the prelim and so it was very hard to edit where one shot would coherently follow on from another with the same movement. However, we found this much easier to do for the thriller as we filmed more shots of each scene.
Prelim
Thriller
Sound:
In the prelim, the only sound used is the diegetic sound of speech that was recorded at the time of filming, and as other groups were filming their prelim's in the same room, their talking is audible in the background. In contrast, our thriller is vastly different in terms of sound. We re-recorded the diegetic speech as we couldn't hear it from the original filming and lip-synced it (which I would have done for the prelim due to the background noise, but we had much longer to do so for the thriller), and, due to the audio removal we also added in more sound effects such as the phone ringing or quiet ambient noise. In addition, we also used a non-copyrighted piece of creepy music in the background to add suspense. Therefore, the editing in our thriller was much better than that of the prelim as it helped make the thriller more realistic and more mysterious, while the prelim didn't have anything added to help emphasise its genre.
Prelim
Thriller
Teamwork:
For the prelim, our group was quite big in comparison to other groups and everyone was talking over each other to suggest the shots that should be filmed and so some suggestions weren't heard and it took a while to film everything and so we didn't get as much footage as we would have hoped. Additionally, our editing was very disorganised, with three of us editing on our own to try and follow the storyboard as closely as possible and some people not editing. However, our thriller group worked very well together in comparison with everyone listening to each other's suggestions and taking them on board during the filming and the editing process to end up with a good final product where everybody played a part.
As a group, we annotated our thriller on YouTube about both the process and effects of using technology for the production of our opening thriller sequence.
