To create a good music video I needed to check out popular music videos and learn the conventions that they used to convey the narrative. I looked at a variety of different videos from many genres to gain a better understanding of the star image. I learnt about the three main narrative conventions that are used to portray the desired message, these include illustration, amplification and disjuncture. Illustration occurs when the video very closely echoes the lyrics and music, Amplification is when the narrative is inspired by the song but a new element is added to complement the song and Disjuncture is when the narrative seems to hold very little relationship to the song and appears quite random.
In order to do this I made a table where I analysed the videos that I watched and described the narrative conventions. This task was really helpful because it helped me to recognise the differences in the narratives. For example, Beyoncé’s music video ‘single ladies’ may have appeared boring at first because it was just a video of three ladies dancing, however after studying it and acknowledging the MES, star image and the structure of the narrative I learnt that these techniques had been used on purpose as Beyoncé is so iconic that she doesn’t need a storyline to be appealing to the audience.
Focusing forward, this task will help me when I come to create my own music video because it has shaped my ideas and I know that I want to make a video that has disjuncture narrative.
