Music Video Theories

At the start of the academic year we learnt the three main theories that are applied to Music videos and throughout this post I will be talking through each of the theories. These are, Narritive, Conceptual and Performance

Narrative
Narritive music videos are ones which tend to tell a story of some sort. The story line is shown throughout the music video, it is not always directly involved with the band but the lyrics in the song usually back up the footage which the video is showing. Narrative music videos are usually shown in the genre of 'Pop' Music videos. I suspect this is due to the more emotional and slow beat songs which come under this Genre, also the audience which this genre is appealing to. Typically this being a teenage girl which has the largest market in music videos as they are the people viewing them, this type of music video is very appealing to this target market. A good example of a narrative music video is


Conceptual 
Another type of music video's is the conceptual music video. Conceptual music videos are completely unique and full of randoms images and videos. Conceptual vidoes are usually based around one idea and throughout the music video this concept/idea is expanded. These music videos can completley range in price, they can be really cheap to make by just using random shots or they can be very expensive due to the amount of after effects and editing that is put into this. As the videos are usually so random they are very difficult to make successfully as the audience usually finds the videos difficult to relate to. An example of a conceptual music video is 'Strawberry Swing by Coldplay'

Performance
Finally, we have performance music videos. These videos are simply the band performing sining the song, these can very in location due to the genre of the song. For instance some music videos consist of the band performing at a 'gig' where as some bands take the approach of performing in more obscure locations, such as U2's song 'Vertigo' where they are performing in the middle of nowhere. Performance music videos consist of a lot of different shots, the reasoning for this being to keep the movie exciting. If there was a lack of shots in a performance video you can imagine how the video could quickly become abit boring. An example of a good performance music video would be 'The pretender' by the Foo Fighters. Although this is filmed in a boring white room, the shots and intensity of the music video keeps it very interesting.