The document discusses music video conventions and how they were applied in a student's music video. It summarizes Andrew Goodwin's theory about the different purposes of music videos, including illustration, amplification, and disjuncture. The student's video aimed for amplification by having some images link to lyrics while adding deeper meaning. Examples are provided. Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory is discussed, and how the student avoided objectifying the female singer. Carol Vernallis' work on editing in music videos is also cited. The student's video included jump cuts, edits, and effects. Additional conventions like looking at the camera were followed. Conventions were also considered for the student's ancillary work like the digipak and advert.

1. The use of music video
conventions in our video

2. Andrew Goodwin
• Andrew Goodwin suggested that all music videos have
different purposes.
• Some are used to tell the story of the lyric (illustration)
• Some are used to add meaning to the lyrics (Amplification)
• And others have very little connection the the lyrics and
sometimes contradicts the lyrics (Disjuncture)

3. Which did our video fall under?
• In our video we aimed to have some images that linked to the lyrics in the
video, while also adding what could be seen as a deeper meaning to the
lyrics.
• We went with Amplification!
• We chose a very flexible storyline that can be interpreted as insight to a
scenario that the lyrics could be covering (the right thing to do) in the end.
Our lead singer ends up ‘doing the wrong thing’ (smoking) which could be
seen as a slight element of Disjuncture.

4. Examples from the video.
This is the shot where
you could argue for
some disjuncture as she
is contradicting what we
established the ‘right
thing to do’ is.
Here we have the lead singer looking very
‘different’ (top right) which, along with some
other pictures, add meaning to the lyrics
“walking alone” and “won’t mean I’ll come for
you” especially because as time progresses
throughout the video, she slowly starts to show
signs of becoming more distant to the producer.

5. Laura Mulvey
• Laura Mulvey focused on the representation of women in music videos.
She came up with a quote in 1992 “in a world order by sexual imbalance,
pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and
passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the
female figure which is styled accordingly.”
• In our video we chose to go against this theory as our female singer wasn’t
dressed, nor was she dismembered in order to appeal to any males
watching.
This is how most videos would
have this theory proven right!
We felt like it was more
appropriate that the female was
fully dressed to keep focus on the
story and not her body.

6. Carol Vernallis
• Carol Vernallis studied the type of editing and camerawork in music
videos, in comparison to films. She looked into how things like continuity
editing are often forgotten about in music videos as they want the
audience to focus on what's on the screen. The camera may move in time
with the music oppose to being remotely still. She also found that jump
cuts and a lot of really obvious edits are used frequently. And a base track
is used to give the video structure.
• Our video did have a lot of jump cuts, obvious edits and special effects.
These are a few of the edits and jump cuts
that we used in our video, and small
influences of where we got the ideas.

7. Additional proof of following most
conventions of a music video.
We have the main
singer looking into the
camera quite often in
the video.
So overall, our video follow most of the conventions of a music video. And some of the
conventions helped put together certain ideas for our video, for example Andrew
Goodwin’s theory guided us into thinking about what message we actually wanted to
get across to our audience. Also Laura Mulvey helped us distinguish the types of shots
that are conventional to the male gaze such as dismembering, which we didn’t use, but
we did have a panning shot not to show the females body in the shot, it was used for
the movement and flow that we were getting from the song.

8. Conventions in the Ancillary work
•
In my Digipak, I had started off wanting to use the colours Blue, Black and Yellow
because they were colours that were used on the SBTRKT Album: SBTRKT.
• But after actually working on the digipak, I changed my
original idea from the drawn version to have the blue and the
yellow on the front cover, to having just yellow and white.
Also I opted to change the block-like font for something more
underground because of the genre being electronic/garage,
and go for a more graffiti type font called Road Crew because
I felt it gave the front panel a much more natural feel for the
type of genre influences.

9. Why I chose to have my CD the way it
is
•
My teacher had told me that I shouldn't have the track-list on the CD because she had never
seen a CD like that before, but I showed her that 'SBTRKT' who are of the same genre as our
artist had the track-list on their CD and I like the idea. This is breaking some sort of
convention for what is meant to be on a CD but I feel like I have a solid reason to have the
tracklist on it.

10. For the Advert
•
On my mock up for the advert I was told that the chosen review's were not very
believable for the genre of the album. As the biggest influence for our artist is
SBTRKT I did some research into what type of websites and magazines were
reviewing their album and chose two: Pitchfork and NME magazine.