how do music videos speak to/ interpolate their audience?

Music videos aim to speak to their audiences and position them in a specific way. This is done through ideology, imagery, positioning and narrative.

Nirvana- Smells like teen spirit-

In this video, the audience are positioned in the crowd watching the live performance by the band. The singer often looks into the camera creating a relationship between himself and the audience. Additionally, it uses ideology to rebel against American high school culture through the cheerleaders being placed within the hellish yellow colour palette video. This positions the audience in the perspective of agreement with the audience regarding this ideology.

M83- Midnight City-

In this video, the audience are not positioned within the plot of the video. By doing this, there is a definite sense of mystery and you gain a sense of knowing without the characters awareness. This further conveys the mystery of the supernatural elements of the video. Additionally, not having a protagonist even for the audience to follow removes the audience from feeling involved further conveying the lack of realism. However, occasionally, the eyes from the children look into the camera in an accusatory way as if they’re being watched which is by the audience. The theme has grunge undertones due to the location of the video being in an abandoned seeming building which may relate to the style of the audience.

Our video-

In our music video, we will position our audience in an observational perspective, they will not be a part of the video but watch from the outside. The lifestyle of the characters is aimed to be regular and relatable but could be aspirational due to the imagery placing emphasis on the aesthetic of the video. Our narrative will have three chapters and a protagonist for the audience to follow around in regards to their journey throughout the video.

timeline

chosen song choice

In the end, we decided to use this song as we felt it held the most potential to create a successfully interesting and creative music video that held all the narrative devices and techniques that are required of us. This song holds an interesting beat that is split into sections, allowing of a creation of a narrative to be formed as well as having appropriate lyrics that we decided could be intertwined with the narrative to add a performance aspect to the piece. This song has a clear set of indie pop conventions to follow, which will add ease when filming to appeal to an audience, and this will also be useful in later evaluations of our piece. The overall recording is of a good quality, with an equally clear backing track, meaning the overall quality of our video will not be hindered by the sound. The only issue that may arise will be the repetitive nature of both the beat and the lyrics, however we hope to overcome this by only loosely matching the lyrics with the narrative, and instead focusing on the themes that arise from listening to this piece- specifically, the theme of a journey.

We have emailed West Coast Massive regarding the copyright permissions of using their music, and they have happily allowed us to do so.