TASK 2: Music Videos

The first experimental music video was made in the 1960's. The Film 'Hard Days Night' from 1964 unintentionally created conventions of music videos that are still used today.

The conventions include multiple camera's, lead singers in focus, cutaways and a variation of shots, such as high angle and zooms.



This first music video, Beat It by Michael Jackson is a narrative based music video. This means that Michael Jackson is a character in the video as well as the performer. The video shows a group being lead by a man in a white coat and a group lead by a man in a leather jacket. These groups face each other and one of the men pulls out a knife, and at this point Michael Jackson steps in and prevents it, and the groups start to dance in sync with him. During the dancing, the camera focuses on Michael Jackson, as he is the song artist and performer and the video is to promote his song.

The video contains shots that are conventions of music videos. The shot to the right is a zoom in shot of Michael Jackson. This ensures that the viewers attention is on him, so that they know who the lead is. Despite having a narrative, the music video is also performance based, as Michael Jackson dances throughout, and in the end everyone is dancing.

The last shot is a high angle shot, also a convention of music videos, and gives the audience a scale of how many people are dancing and enjoying the music, and watching people enjoy the music in the video may have the same impact on them.






This next video, 'Eat It' by Weird Al is a pastiche of Beat It by Michael Jackson. It emulates the work shot for shot for the most part, except for the ending, which rather than having a high angle shot of dancing, has another close up of Weird Al. The props use also differs, as instead of a knife, spoons are used to coincide with the change in lyrics and theme of the parody song.



Space Oddity, by David Bowie is a performance based music video. Throughout the video it focuses just on David Bowie singing the song with his guitar. This music uses the convention of handheld camera very effectively. There are a lot of zooms towards Bowie and the guitar and towards the end we see the camera get very shaky in conjunction with the sounds that occur.

The video also has elements of an abstract and artistic music video, with the use of special effects like the green sound waves that appear over the top of Bowie. Also, his face is red throughout, giving the overall video a very Sci-Fi feel, which is quite fitting because the video is about Major Tom being lost in space.




This music video, Shuttin' Detroit Down by John Rich combines both Narrative based Music Videos and Performance based. There is a clear narrative, that an experienced worker loses his job and gets defended by his young coworker, but the performer does not appear in the video. Instead, there a frequent cutaways to the song being performed with a guitar. Also unlike the other videos, this song is interrupted by dialogue from the narrative regularly, which suggests the producer wanted the story to be highlighted.

This music video follows the conventions of music videos with the use of close ups towards the performer. This allows the viewer to acknowledge who is singing it in order to promote his work.

It also concludes with a long shot to show the performer in full and also his surroundings, but in contrast to 'Beat It' by Michael Jackson, this shot is not high angle, and this may be due to the fact that there are no dancers, but just one performer.