Music video conventions

By Isabella Kirby

Conventions
The video will last for around 3-4 minutes.
music videos usually combines a variety
of different aspects for example; live
performance, narrative, and other visual
imagery including computer graphics and/
or animation.
It does this to advertise the band/artist,
song and editing abilities to make the
video more intriguing.

Performance
Many music videos include performance
of the artists as part of the video.
This makes us focus on the artist thus
we create an association with the music
and artist making us remember the
imagery of the artist when listening to
the song.
This creates a fan base for the artist
individually separated from the music.

Performance
conventions
Typically we will see a live stage performance shots
of the artist.
This may be the artists in real life situations eg
warming up, conversing , laughing, etc.
close ups of the artist are used and sometimes using
specific visual style that goes with the artist (a motif)
eg particular clothing, actions, props, type of images.
Often the artist can appear to perform in an unusual
place - all lip-synched eg a field, a rooftop, in space,
etc.

Conventions of
gender portrayal
Men- this involves a particular appearance of the
character who will entice the viewer. The male is
seen to be addressing the viewer directly. He is
supposed to be singing directly for you. This makes
us feel special thus we begin a fan base.

The female figure is often an object of an erotic gaze,

most likley the object of male desire.. A Voyeur is
someone who looks at someone for pleasure. This
means females in music videos are often dressed and
posed in very sexual ways to entice the men and
create a sexual tension- this attracts audiences.

Themes
There are lots of common conventions
regarding themes in music videos.
Heavy metal bands go for perfomance
domination, Rap- street images, in
our case we used a dance routine,
which is common for many female
artist performances within the jail thus
sticking to the conventions.

Narrative
If a storyline is being produced at the
beginning you are likely to have
beginning and end narrative. This is a
norm convention for this type of music
video.
In other music videos there will be little
narrative involved and only narrative
will be used in order to help create a
theme to the video.
Many conventional music videos will not
have narrative, focusing specifically on
the music- we stuck to this convention

The end
Summary- thus conventions
create a guidelines of how to
create music videos and help us
understand what the audience
will be interested in.