Carol Vernallis Analysis of Music Video (Course Work)

Carol Vernallis Analysis of Music Video

Carol Vernallis's theory revolve's around four different and important concepts.I am going to break them down. They are:

1. Narrative
2. Diegsis
3. Camera Movement and Framing
4. Editing 

I try to speak on and analyse all these important concepts for a music video. 

• Narrative -

• A music video is a visual response to the song and lyrics, not the other way around. The video should be support the lyrics meanings and song, but the artist/star will remain dominant, this is to appeal to an audience.
• There does not need to be a  balance between narrative and performance. A song can have a full video of narrative, or full of performance or a mixture. Most of the time performance takes prominence in order to to show of the star and song more

Diegesis -

Music videos is known as the "world" inside the video. It is always revealed slowly allowing interventions, and a story to develop over time. Repetition is key in a music video because it allows the artist to get a message across through the concept of quantity, it means that they can create a world for their song through the video.

Camera Movement and Framing -

• When it comes to camera shots, Extremes are VERY common along with Establishing shots, even if they are Extreme close-ups, or at a extreme distance, music videos try to avoid shots such as mid-shots, or a middle-ranged shot. They tend to sit on the the extreme ends of the scale.

• Styles of framing and movement tend to run all the way through the video.

• The camera may move in time with the music, just like the edits as in my previous post this is just for drawing focus onto the artist.

• Repetition in the music video is really common to portray a message or meaning the style of framing and movement are usually a continuing theme that is distinctive to that video/genre.

Editing -

• Editing will sometimes match the musical instruments or the beat of the song, linking the visual images together this way, the audience realises that the beat/rhythm links in with the visual images and will relate these visual images to other things after watching the video.

• Music videos constantly break or disrupt the "rules" of continuity editing. This is the main convention of music video editing.

• When we see edits they will tend to be quite obvious, in divergence to the "invisible" continuity editing This needs to be really obvious, the edits actually have to draw attention to themselves and a successful music video will do this to assist in breaking the narrative.