Summery of Andrew Goodwin's theory

In chapter four, The Structure of Music Video, Rethinking Narrative Analysis, Andrew Goodwin tries to explain to us some of the key features which make up a music video.

He begins by explaining that music videos differ from films for instance due to their non traditional narrative analyses. Then he gives us 2 reasons for why they have different narrative structures.

1. Pop videos are built around songs – and often songs do not pose traditional narrative structures, for example with Tonight’s the kind of night by Noah and the Whale.

2. The pop video uses the singer both as narrator and as a character, an example of this could be the Bike Song by Mark Ronsons.

3. The singer often looks directly at the camera, this is a way of trying to involve the viewers at home with the performer.

Andrew Goodwin then goes on to say that one of the main characteristic of a music video is the repletion it relies so heavily on. The video may repeat images in time with the chorus, or include repletion of parts or rhythms of other songs (intertecturality) in order for us the viewer to become familiar with the genre and also develop certain expectations for it. Sometimes the video may provide visual pleasure in order to encourage repeated viewing with therefore promotes the music. He also reminds us that the video would be played on TV, the radio and maybe during the advertisement of films, this all then makes the song very familiar.

Goodwin also gives us 3 types of relationships between songs and videos: illustration, amplification and disjuncture.  Often pop videos for instance have easily recognisable features in order to be more memorable, however all types of music videos try and appeal to as wide an audience as possible without alienating the core target audience. 

Analysis of a music video that you consider to be the best example of the music video form

I think an example of a music video which follows the music video forms is The Bike Song, by Mark Ronson. In the video we straight away get a sense of repetition not only through the lyrics ‘I’m gona ride my bike until I get home, I’m gona ride my bike until I get home’, but also through the setting with having bikes as the main attraction, this way making the video catchy and easy to not only recognise but also remember. Similarly, the structure of the video is very much with the way the song goes, what I mean by this is that its edited to the beat and has obvious edits in places such as slow motions or close ups which is a common feature of music videos.

Most importantly however in the video we have the actual artist participating, along side the actors which allows the video to do its main job which is to promote the artist and the song.

Song Permission Requests

Clearance Letters (Research)

- This is the first letter I sent, there's two more like it, with the same format just two different artists and songs but more or less the same thing. I researched the song that I wanted to do then I went and looked up the artists label then got their information and contacted them.

I sent off my first two requests to the same company and I was delighted to see they replied and allowed me to use their material for my work, my task was now done and I could proceed with it.

Reflecting back on the AS year: 3

- The lip synch tutorial was very helpful and a good introduction to music videos, our two teachers showed us how to use final cut pro much like our thriller movies to cut up a music video using a sample music video. We put the video up on final cut pro then put markers on the bits he sings and cut it to the beat and also cut the actual video with the razor tool to the beats it looked like good. The tools we used were the razor tool on FCP to cut the video to time, the marker tool to segment the clip, the time line also showed us at which bits to cut. The skill was quite difficult to develop especially because of the base track, which was hard to match since it was my first time using it. The hardest part was matching the right time with all the clips individually to the same base track.

Reflecting back on the AS year: 2

- We went out with my group to the garden with the video camera, the music player, the speaker, the tripod/bag, and the lyrics to our song. And also our small camera, which was used for stills for our future blogs. One person filmed while me and the other two were on screen, we then put the speaker on and the song played while we attempted to lip synch to it which, was very difficult since we had a small time to learn the lyrics. So we did it in freestyle while reading the words at the same time, we repeated that process six times from different angles which took a long time to do, after which we took some stills then we went on to edit it on the Macs. The editing was familiar to us since we had done a sample video so we got that done using the same techniques but it took a while too.

In the AS year I learnt a lot of technical skills:

- I can film with or without the tripod
- I can use photoshop at a higher level
- I can use sound track pro
- I can cut with soundtrack & final cut pro
- I learnt a lot about filming rules

Reflecting back on the AS year: 1

- The Photoshop tutorial was quite helpful because it taught me some things I didn't know but overall it was basic since I am quite familiar with the system on a different level but I only know it on PC so this is sort of new to me. She taught us how to use the basic skills on the programme like how to use the magic wand and how to inverse cut which was new to me and also how to add a template and we fiddled with it just to get a feel of it. I found it quite easy but also educational.