TASK 2 Music Video Analysis - Ed Sheeran The A Team

Ed Sheeran's music video uses a narrative structure and therefore doesnt have a band performance in it. The narrative is told to the audience with a circular structure in which the video starts at the end and is told from another persons perspective who is watching the girls life.

Within the video there are several close ups of the protagonist. This causes the audience to empathise with the with her because the lyrics link to what we are seeing, a girl struggling through life. We can infer that the target audience for this video would be the younger generation between the ages of 15 - 25, which would be similar to the singers age and that would allow them to be able to relate to the song and the artist. 

The song is about drugs which is a topic that is commonly associated with teenagers and the struggles addiction causes in the early years of people's lives. The music video appeals to both genders because, although a female is the protagonist in the video, the artist is male and the subjects it talks about can relate to both boys and girls.

The music begins when it has been established that drugs have been the cause of death of the girl lying in the room. 

The video shows a long shot of a homeless girl sleeping on a bench with only a sleeping bag to keep her warm. This suggests that she doesn't have a place to live or sleep. By doing this, the director puts all focus on the protagonist as the audience want to know more about her and causes them to ask questions about why she is there and what has happened to her to put her in that situation. It triggers curiosity about her life. A close up shot of her wiping her face and pulling the sleeping bag closer to her is used, which shows the audience she is cold, causing them to empathise with her.

The mis en scene also conveys that the girl is homeless, poor and struggling through the costume she is wearing. Her tights are ripped and she is wearing a mans coat which is much too large for her.  A long shot of the girl displaying her legs to make the car to stop is used which shows that the girl has turned to prostitution in order to survive. The lighting is very natural all the way through the video which creates a sense of realism to convey the large number of people that actually experience hardships like this in their lives. However, there is key lighting is on her face to display her negative expression. The protagonist has no power in the video and the drugs are there to take her away from reality.  

There is a shot of girl the walking up a hill on her own with nobody around her and she begins to frantically look around as though somebody is following her. This creates a sense of panic and emphasises the dangers of a girl living on the streets alone. This contrasts to another shot when she looks up to the sky and smiles before raising her arms to to sky. This foreshadows her death as it connotes that she would rather be in the sky, in heaven than down on Earth. This is perhaps the reason that she takes an overdose at the end of the video. 

This video manages to attract it's target audience because it tackles contemporary issues that teenagers would be facing and be able to relate to.

TASK 2 Music Videos - Lady Gaga

Many of Lady Gaga's videos share the same narrative of a male trying to take advantage of her wealth and talent and as a result, she takes drastic measures to reassert her dominance. A similar plot structure is seen within the "Paparazzi" video in which her boyfriend tries to use her fame for money and tries to kill her by throwing her from a balcony when she does not comply with his wishes. After Gaga is pushed off the balcony, she is sent into a downward spiral reflective of how the paparazzi are more obsessed with the downfall of celebrities than all of the good things celebrities do.

Gaga glorifies the representation Disability within this video and tries to make wheelchairs, crutches and neck braces a fashion statement by covering them with expensive jewels and modeling them on a purple carpet, perhaps she is showing that even when celebrities are hurt or injured they are still expected to look beautiful and fashionable for the public in order to maintain their celebrity status.

Throughout the second verse there are shots of dead women that have experienced a death that symbolises different types of fame. The first woman is shown in a bathtub wearing bunny ears, a symbol often associated with Playboy, perhaps conveying the downfall of promiscuity. The woman in a diamond mask is representative of money and the dead woman wearing horns with a bullet wound in her head could be interpreted as the lure of cult like promises of obtaining fame. The woman hung from stairwell with an eye patch and a wine bottle in her hand explains how some people are blind to what ails them and in doing so bring their own early downfalls. The broken woman by the pool can represent the party life of most celebrities and the maid, who is bleeding gold blood, represents how a celebrity is valued and respected more when they are dead than when they are alive. Lastly, the woman with drugs in her hand lying on the plastic bed could symbolise the overdosing of both drugs and the fame lifestyle itself when you have money and power.

Gaga regains her dominance at the end of the video by poisoning her boyfriends drink and killing him. “I just killed my boyfriend,” Gaga admits to the operator and after the police investigate the crime scene, they arrest her and she is more than willing to play along. She has put herself back in the spotlight, and so, flaunts herself as she poses for the paparazzi who are taking her picture. This clearly conveys how celebrities who get caught doing illegal things and behaving illicitly use their arrests to contribute towards their fame and successes.

In conclusion, Lady Gaga uses symbolism and metaphors within her music videos to convey her thoughts and feelings towards the music industry to the audience which she clearly believes to be repressive, controlling and very heavily male dominated. Using extravagant imagery, she has shown the double standards that celebrities are given and how society in general find their downfalls and hardships entertaining and therefore are more interested in that and celebrity gossip than their music and talents itself.

The Lady Gaga “Bad Romance” video explores themes such as money, capitalism and the way women are treated within the music industry. The story line shows her being kidnapped by supermodels before being drugged, sexualised and sold to the Russian mafia.

The video opens to show six women being hatched from white pods. They’re wearing white costumes that could connote their innocence at this point in the video as the colour white stereotypically signifies purity and innocence.

The next shot displays Gaga lying clothed in a bathtub, with her eyes edited to be significantly larger than usual. Again this could be referencing her purity and cleanliness before the music industry began to taint her personality. Her “Wide eyes” connote the naïve innocence she perhaps entered the music industry with.

The shot of the models kidnapping Lady Gaga jump cuts to her with minimal make up on crying from a high angle shot, making her appear weak and vulnerable. Her helplessness is intended to trigger empathy from the audience.

The supermodels then surround Gaga and forcefully tear her jacket off whilst she struggles to keep it on, before dancing partially nude in front of the Russian mafia. She attempts to shield her naked body with her hands and this could be referencing the way the music industry sexualise women in order to make them appeal to a male audience. Women usually enter the industry with “Wide eyes” and are not aware of the things they will be persuaded to do in order to sell their music and we can inference that this is what Gaga is symbolising in her video.

Later on in the video, Gaga goes from wearing white clothes which connotes purity to red and black clothes to visually display the shift of her innocence towards darkness. Eventually we see Lady Gaga win the power battle by burning the man who tried to control her after sleeping with him and then smoking a cigarette next to his charred corpse.

TASK 2 Music Videos - Rihanna

Rihanna - B*tch Better Have My Money

This music video is 7 minutes long and is a revenge fantasy for celebrity Rihanna who claims that her accountant Peter Gounis gave her unsound advice that lost her over £9,000,000. The plot depicts that an accountant has defrauded the singer out of money so in retaliation she kidnaps his wife, a wealthy white woman. With two friends she puts her into a trunk and strips her naked before swinging her upside down from a rope, knocking her out with a bottle and then almost drowning her in a swimming pool. When that doesn’t get her the money, Rihanna finds the accountant and straps him to a chair before killing him. The video finishes by showing Rihanna covered in blood and naked in a trunk of money.

This controversial video has sparked a ginormous debate between those who found it extremely offensive and "not safe for feminists" as it "glamorizes kidnapping and sexual humiliation". And those who found it brilliant and congratulated Rihanna on her attempts to fight equality and cast herself, a female as "the gangster boss" that you would usually find men playing.

However in addition to this, a racial dispute has commenced over Twitter as the black characters are portrayed as the most dominant and in control of the white people's fate by openly torturing and murdering them in order to get what they want, in this case money. People argue that the white characters are depicted as "vulnerable and weak" by Rihanna and are therefore outraged by her "display of racism". 

Short Film Task - The Boy Who Says Yes

To refresh our memories about planning and filming a project we were given a short task to complete. We were given the scenario of a boy who could only answer questions with "Yes" and could never say no and had to plan and film something that met the criteria within one lesson. I directed the film, Katie was the camerawoman and Ellie and Oli acted in it. However, I was absent when we edited the piece together using Premiere Pro so I watched some basic tutorials on YouTube to refresh my memory on how to edit a short project together. 

What I Learned

I refreshed my memory on how to use the camera's as we all took turns practicing with it before we started filming to ensure that everybody had a chance to familiarise themselves with it. When filming our short film last year, some of the footage got cut too short because we did not leave enough time before clicking record and the actors beginning to perform. We corrected this issue this time by leaving three seconds after pressing record and three seconds after the actors had finished before finishing recording. 

How To Improve

Due to the short time we had to film the footage we did not get to use as many camera angles as I would have liked to. For example, we could have used a match on action when the teacher kicked the bin and we could have used over the shoulder shots or point of view shots of the other students watching the boy and the teachers conversation. We could have also used sound bridges to lay the dialogue underneath shots of the other students to make the film flow nicely and not look too disjointed and robotic. We need to follow the rules of continuity editing to achieve this. We also should have followed the script and storyboard more closely and not improvised some of the dialogue as it did not always sound clear and confident, which took away from the overall impact of the video.

TASK 2 Research Into Existing Media Texts - Music Videos

In today's lesson, we analysed music videos and the theory that there are three different types of music video:

1.Narrative based music video: This kind of music video has a story line which enables the viewer to further understand the lyrics and meaning behind the song.
2.Performance based music video: Where the artist/band physically perform to the camera usually on a stage or in a studio.
3.Abstract music video: An artistic approach, the video may have a subtle meaning or none at all.

Narrative Music Video: Sam Smith - I'm Not The Only One

This is an example of a narrative music video as in it, Sam Smith explores the fallout of a fictional extramarital affair that symbolises a similar experience that he went through himself. Actress Dianna Agron plays the role of a devastated wife that shows exactly how much the affair hurts: After some drunken crying, she sneaks out of her house in an attempt to catch her husband in the act and returns home before burning his clothes in their front garden. Actor Chris Messina plays the cheating husband in the narrative video. By assisting his music with this particular video, Sam Smith is introducing an even more emotive element to his song and is ensuring that his audience will understand the true meaning of the song and the issues he is raising within it, as lyrics alone can sometimes be easily misinterpreted or misunderstood.

Performance Music Video: Catfish And The Bottlemen - Kathleen

Although slightly abstract due to the tainted red and green filters used on the video and the hazy "double vision effect" this video displays the band "Catfish And The Bottlemen" performing one of their songs to the camera, making it a performance based music video. The Camera mainly focuses upon lead singer Van McCann with a series of close ups and individual long shots, before jump cutting to wide shots of the entire band. The entire video is mainly made up of quick jump cuts between a variety of shots, giving it a disjointed and chaotic atmosphere to emphasise Van's emotions. A man who is clearly very in love and unable to think clearly, the double vision and colourful filters support this.

Abstract Music Video: Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know

This music video is abstract not only because of the obvious abstract art that the singer has been painted in itself, but because the lyrics of the song and the video do not obviously assist each other in portraying a definitive meaning. It is very much open to personal interpretation. For example, from my point of view the lyrics of the song are explaining a dysfunctional relationship, perhaps between Gotye and the female in the video and we could suggest that the video is symbolising their story and emotional journeys with the paint.  As he mentally enters his memories of the old relationship through the lyrics he is singing, the paint begins to slowly cover his entire body. The female, Kimbra enters the shot already painted, perhaps indicating that at this point in the song, she is very much invested in the relationship with him. She moves closer to him as she breaks up with him, then moves away as she cuts him off. At this point the paint is removed from her body because she is moving on with her life. However, Gotye has not yet moved on, so he remains painted. However, this is just one interpretation and is not made obvious purely by the video itself. The video acts as a catalyst for individual thought and interpretation and is therefore an abstract music video.

Christian Metz Model Of Genre Development 

Christian Metz explored the development of genre film and suggested that all genres pass through four phases.

The Experimental Stage

The Classical Stage

The Parody Stage

The Deconstruction stage

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Metz's Model Applied to Horror Films

The Experimental phase refers to the first phase of films which experimented with the horror genre within its narrative. Because these "experiments" were the first of their genre, they helped to form the narrative conventions for horror films that are still used today,

The Classical phase refers to films that continued to form the narrative conventions of the horror genre but in its most successful period, films that did this include Dracula and Frankenstein.

The Parody phase refers to films that have taken the horror genre and combined it with comedy in order to "make fun" of them in a comical way. Films like Scary Movie are a good example of this.

This leads on to the Deconstruction phase which is more modern and refers to films that have taken elements of the horror genre and combined them with other genres to form Sub Genres. For example Science Fiction horror films such as "The Mist".

Metz's Model Applied to Music Videos

The Experimental Phase

The Beatles - If I Fell 1964

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody



The Classical Phase

Michael Jackson - Beat It



The Parody Phase

"Weird Al "Yankovic - Eat It