In order to prepare to plan my own music video it is important to analyse other music videos and learn about the technical conventions. A music videos purpose is to promote the song and add to the star’s image and their brand.

Here is my analysis of four music videos:

Please click to view the document.

From this task I have learnt that music videos have one or both of the following focuses; performance and narrative.  A performance focused music video is when the artist is just performing their song. A narrative contains little or no performance elements and is based heavily on story telling, like a short film.

One technical convention of music videos that I have learnt through this task is lip syncing. Lip syncing is very important so the artist looks like they could be singing their song live and it could be very off putting and distracting if the lyrics and lip syncing are out of sync with each other.

I also learnt that a music video aids the song in one of three ways:

• Illustration – The narrative in the video very closely echoes the lyrics and music.
• Amplification – The narrative whilst inspired by the song adds a new element to complement the song.
• Disjuncture – The narrative seems to hold very little relationship to the song and seems quite random.