Introduction to Music Videos

Music videos can fall into multiple categories, narrative, performance and abstract.

Conventional films use a range of long shots, mid shots and close ups to keep the audience engaged in the narrative, it is important in film to ensure that the audience isn't taken out of this narrative so they can continue to believe the sense of realism within the film and familiarise themselves with the characters. These conventional forms are broken in music videos. The main focus of a music video is to promote the song and to carry it further, for this to work there needs to be a balance between making the video memorable and captivating, whilst maintaining the audiences awareness of the song. In cases of a narrative based music videos there are multiple ways in which the producer can take the audience out of the narrative, such as cutting to an artist performance, introducing jump cuts, not following the general ideas behind continuity or something as simple as going in and out of focus.

Music video does however follow it's own conventions. A conventional music video is likely to follow a particular formula, the video will be very typical for that of its genre and codes are generic and presented openly. An example of the format it may follow would be to cut between a narrative and a band performance using a series of regular cuts and keeping a fluidic motion. Conventional music videos generally hold a sense of realism and are unlikely to feature any kind of supernatural quality, however they do still appear in some videos. An original video is set out to shock and maybe even disturbed the audience, it doesn't follow a particular formula and involves a general theme of discontinuity. A prime example of this is Marilyn Manson's 'the beautiful people' it features shocking imagery, flickering edits and a series of shots and cuts that don't consistently match the beat. It is often these original videos that stay inside the audiences mind and are used as a promotion for the song, however in some cases the video can over shadow the song.

The use of long shots allow the key subject to be lost and minimized by the area around them, mid-shots