The narrative portion of a music video is important not to be complete to create enigma so that the audience want to rewatch the video.

It can be one of the following:

• Amplified – The video links to the key themes and messages of the lyrics and aids them.
• Disjunctive – The video and lyrics have very little to do with each other.
• Illustrative – The narrative illustrates the lyrics directly.

We decided to go with an amplified narrative so that we could link to the lyrics of the song (“introvert”) but also convey our own message; be unique and don’t be afraid to be yourself.

We also learnt about Todorov’s theory, how each narratove should include an equilibrium, a disruption, a resolution and a new equilibrium. This represents the typical beginning, middle and end to a narrative  as well as the problem and the solution to the problem within the narrative. However, to keep your audience engaged with the whole video, lots of music videos don’t follow this structure completely so as to make the audience want to watch the video again to try and work out the ending to the story. As well as this, music videos aren’t always long enough to fit the whole story in. There are lots of different structures that producers can use tell their story such as:

• Anachronic – (flashbacks, flash-forwards, out of sequence)
• Episodic – (Short self contained scenes usually thematically linked)
• Parallel – (Cross cutting between two scenes that meet at the climax)
• Linear – runs in chronological order

An example of an anachronic structure is this piece from a past student ‘Cold, Cold, Cold‘. In this video, they used the body parts on the patient to create flashbacks which are triggered by senses. For example, when there is a close up shot of the hand, a flashback occurs that is to do with the sense of touch, suggesting to us that this is what the patient experienced when they were awake. This was very effective as it showed us glimpses of their life without giving away too much, making us want to watch the video the whole way through to see what happened to the patient.

In order to prepare for shooting our narrative, we compiled this document of initial planning and ideas for our amplified narrative.

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