Applying Narrative

I will apply narrative to the piece of work I enjoyed doing most, which was creating a music video for my advance portfolio. This included the song ‘Heads will roll’ by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s. We began by looking at dance video’s that matched the genre of our band/song and tried to apply a narrative to the videos. However most videos of this genre don’t really have a strong narrative due to their , therefore it was hard to represent this genre and still consider a narrative in our video.

Our music video falls into Andrew Goodwin’s theory of ‘amplification’ – where we simply enhanced or exaggerated certain lines such as ‘Oh no’ which was repeated. It has a linear structure, meaning it is chronological (no flashbacks) and doesn’t confuse the audience between time and space. During the research stages of the advance portfolio we looked at Rita Ora’s ‘party and party’ video, this was helpful to us as it included the house party setting and didn’t represent a strong narrative. Therefore we knew it would be possible to create something similar.

The main theme in our video was ‘fun’ as well as trying to create a house party feel. We felt the idea of having a ‘fun’ video was important in relation to our young target audience of 16-25 year olds and could result in the video acting as a form of escapism. We created the theme of fun through various elements of media language. The video featured a very energetic teenage girl who is seen dancing and lipsyncing through the use of mid-shots and close-ups on her face. We also used jump-cuts to match the generic convention of a dance video’s speed. The speed of the video and wild dancing of the girl fits a ‘loose’ narrative, which makes it easy for viewers to watch repeatedly due to the video not having a strong narrative that could get monotonous if the viewer was to watch it more than once. John Stewarts theory of music video’s displaying an ‘aspirational lifestyle’ could be applicable to our video as the video emanates fun and a carefree lifestyle, which is something teenager’s aspire to have, or already have.

The mise-en scene in the video had a studio feel to it, as we used a white background for most of the filming and a projector screen that projected colourful backgrounds of green and pink. The colourful (pink and green) backgrounds gave the video continuity and matched the house party theme. We used props in our video such as the DJ’s mixer. This added authenticity to the video as it made the sound seem synchronous. We also used this prop to amplify some lyrics such as ‘off, off, off…’. We did this by repeating a shot of the dj’s hand on one of the controls, this looked really effective as the dj’s hand jumped in time with the music and added a sense of realism.

Although the video feature’s a teenage boy and a teenage girl, there is no sexual element in our video. However voyeuristic qualities could be applied to the girl as she is very active in the video and around the male character. I would agree with Laura maulvey’s theory of ‘the art of looking’ as the female knows she Is being watched. This is displayed through the use of close-up’s as she sings and gives direct eye-contact to the camera. (This is something the male in the video does not do).

Levis Straus’ theory of ‘binary opposites’ could be applied to our video as we had an active member (the female protagonist)and a passive member (DJ). Andrew Goodwin has also suggested that ‘music video’s are an extension of lyrics’, which fits with our ‘amplification video’ as we simply focused on key lyrics such as the chorus ‘heads will roll’. Goodwin’s theory also match’s Steve archer’s theory that ‘video’s tend to only suggest a story line and focus more on fragmentations of lyrics’. We displayed this in our video by having a slightly quirky band yet a dance genre with specific key lyrics exaggerated. This suggests a slight storyline even though a strong clear narrative isn’t really present.