Looking into the conventions of alternative rock music videos

2. Mise en Scene
There is often a shot of a
bathroom location or a
shot looking into the mirror.
The setting in several
of the music videos is
in an urban city area
often at night utilising
the lighting of the
street lights and cars.
For setting in the daytime and
in more rural areas the
location is thought about a lot
especially the colours.
The costumes of the band or artist in
music videos tend to be a lot more
casual and the singers especially the
female singers tend to have several
costume changes throughout the
video. The costumes of the band tend
to be quite dark.
A lot of the costumes for the characters
in the narrative tend to be quite casual
and tend to be mostly black and white
there are some exceptions though.

3. Camera
A tilt down camera
movement often
shows the establishing
shot in the video
A lot of mid shots of the
dinger especially are often
seen in the music videos
occasionally the shot is
also a tracking shot
following the artist.
Group shots are often found in
music videos to show the band
or to show important people in
the narrative the shots tend to
be either mid or long shots and
are usually angled straight on.
There is a lot of
close-ups of the
singers face as they
are singing and
there is usually a
high frequency of
these shots
throughout the video
There are a lot of two shots in the
narrative sides of the music
videos the two-shots can range
from long shots to over the
shoulder shots and often depict a
child and there parent.

4. Camera
There tends to be extreme
close-ups focusing on the
instruments usually the guitars
the close-ups appear
throughout the video and at
different angles.
There are usually a lot of
extreme close-ups which
tend to only be found in the
narrative where the character
is doing something important
to the story.
Extreme close-ups of hands and
feet seem to occur quite often in
this genre especially in the
narrative side of the music
vidoes.

5. Editing
Having text upon the screen
is quite unusual in music
videos but this can show that
the music video is going to
be story like.
There is often fancy editing
where the artist is faded into
an area of the shot such as
this mirror shot
Some music videos use
lighting to blur out some
shots or blur them out
during editing to create an
effect.
The use of pen to scratch out
a persons face in shots is an
obvious use of effects in
editing and is used in this
case to show emotion of the
narrative.
There is a use of jump cuts in
some of the music videos to cut
the length of some of the
narrative shots down or to cut to
the music.
Usually towards the end of the
video an effect such as blur or
fade will occur to show it’s the
end.
Lighting effects done
whilst editing often
shows a change in
scene of the
narrative of illustrate
a change in tempo
of the song.
All the cuts in the music video
cut in time with the music so as
the song speeds up the cutting
will match it.