Research: Features of Music Videos

For this task we were asked to watch several music videos on the popular music website "vevo.com" and find the common features in the videos and then note them down. Here you can see the notes that I made for this task.

1. The first key feature that I found whilst watching the music videos was the speed of the editing that was used throughout. An example of this would be that if the song was a slower song (a sad song for example) the cuts would be very slow however if it was a fast paced song (rap song maybe) the cuts would be much quicker and go with the beat.

2. Another key feature that I found whilst doing this task was that there is almost always a shot of the artist/band that is performing the song. This convention is there so that the media consumer can recognise who is singing the song that they are either enjoying or not.

3. The next feature that I found is the colour and brightness levels. An example of this would be that if it was a sad song then it may be in black and white and very low brightness however if it was a happy song then it would be bright and full colour to really set the mood of the song for the media consumer.

4. A convention that I saw in all of the music videos that I saw was lip syncing. Throughout all of the music videos I watched at one point or another there was some lip syncing. I think that this is used to really engage the media consumer.

5. Conventions that I saw in hip-pop music was expensive cars, money and attractive women, I think that these are used in music videos to engage the audience as these are all things that the media consumer want to enjoy along with the music and gives them a feeling of the sort of music they are listening to.

6. Another thing that I saw in the music videos was the costumes that the people in the music were wearing (mise-en-scene), for example in hip-pop videos the people would be dressed to look like a stereotypical "gangster". Whilst in pop music the stars of the music video are usually dressed more like the typical person with casual clothes or even smart. I found that in both hip-pop and pop the females were more inappropriately dressed however.