Evaluation task 1 – Narrative, Lyrics and editing structure

In the narrative theme we choose to go with the influence from the British James Bond movies that represent quality and perfection in what he does, which is what we were trying to portray on the male hero in the narrative. This was also influence by the movie “storm breaker” that was shot in a scrap yard using the elements of the set to reinsure the use of the location and the tension of what is happening. Therefore we also had a victim and used the conventions such a gag, ripped clothes and high angle shots to see the vulnerability of the woman to pleasure the audience with what they expect. By using James Bond and Storm breaker as our main conventions this could be applied to one of Goodwin’s key features arguing that “There are likely to be intertextual references, either to other music video or to films or TV texts” the use of old text or known text can help an audience to spark some kind of recognition and interest in the product also argued by Steve archer is that intertextuality will increase the audience engagement with the product.

Comparison between stormbreaker,and James Bond to our product

What is further more argued by Steve Archer that the narrative is rarely complete and often just shows parts of the product leaving the audience longing for more, quoting: “often music videos will cut between narrative and performance of the song by the band… But it is the lip-sync close-up and the miming of playing instruments that remains at the heart of music video, as if to assure that the band can really kick it” and it is also this that is argued to be the way to reach out to the audience. Below we can see an example of this that we used in our video

The lyrics of the song “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” states that the man doesn’t want to be conformed, plain and simple, but wanted to go against the dominant ideology of society which especially applies to today’s high pace of production also applicable to the music industry. By using this we tried to create a similar star image for our band by portraying them as demanding quality and different products to be brought to the market and seeing the importance of albums and not singles’. This would be applicable to what Goodwin argues to be one of the key features that “there is a relationship between the lyrics and the visual, with the visual either, illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics”. Since lyrics helps to establish a general feeling and mood were for example key lines such as the chorus we often choose to show the singer in a close-up shown in the picture above to get a the message through to the audience.

We choose to SUBVERT the editing of the music video, though it was cut according to the beat, lip-sync or the lyrics but we did not cut as for a normal music video, but instead the music video was a promotional tool for a movie therefore changing the order of the shots. On the day we had high ratio shooting and together with both narrative and performance we took over 140 shots, this is in many cases normal for big companies since shooting days are expensive and should be as productive as possible. So the shots were then divided in to bigger part of narrative since it was important to create a story, promoting the movie, therefore using up to 30 seconds of just narrative structure. This is not common as in a normal music video almost every other shot is suppose to be going from performance to narrative. But for us it was important to introduce the movie to the audience so that the music video could be used as a promotional tool.
Here is a similar type of music video that is also promoting a movie, in this case transformers they also are using the same way of editing, long scenes of narrative ; Link: Similar promtional music video