Theory: Carol Vernallis

When producing our music video, we also took inspiration form Media theorist Carol Vernallis, who highlighted the clear differences between a film and a music video, breaking down the video into four concepts: Narrative, editing, framing, and camera movement to do so.

Narrative:

Vernallis argues that what is happening in the video reflects the song, therefore it is the visual representation of the lyrics. We have attempted to employ this through both story lines in our video- firstly presenting the distanced relationship and how they come back together- walking towards one another, and also through our secondary narrative- with the break-up of the couple highlighting the dark tone of the song about love.

Editing

Our Vernallis Inspired video timeline

Carol says that unlike normal films, music videos break the rule of continuity- as they are normally only 2 to 4 minutes long, they need to be rapid and eye catching to engage the audience and reflect the entire message of the song and its style- it "cuts to the beat". Within our video, we aim to apply this theory by matching the beat of the song to our editing, to reflect its style, whilst also using a "rapid shift" between scenes to break the continuity rule and draw the attention between the individual artists and the narrative story.

Camera Movement

Vernallis argued that in a music video, the camera should move in time with the music in order to create a better sense of rhythm- "producing the illusion of an edit although there has not been one". Within our video we use very little camera movement, but the variety of angles and unusual tilts is intentional to reflect her views.

Framing

One of Vernallis's ideas is that by breaking the fourth wall, we no longer view the artists as objects but more as real individuals- the most common framing being the artist in the centre of the frame, as well as master shots to introduce the setting and imagery of the song. We definitely have tried to stick to this framing in our video- with the majority of our studio footage directly focusing on the artist, both individually and together, to give the video structure and promote the artist and avoid focusing on the sub-narrative.