Generic Research - Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #2

 Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #2 - Take on Me, a-ha

This music video is a combination of video recordings and pencil-sketched rotoscoping animation. The narrative is simple - a girl is sitting alone in a cafe reading a comic. The comic comes to life as a hand reaches out to take her into the cartoon - where the narrative then tur
ns to a love story. They get chased out by the other characters, ad the lead singer (one of the cartoons) comes into the real world with the girl, and the video ends. Throughout the video there is a theme of the "love conquers all" stereotype, a popular theme within the genre - and the narrative itself is reminiscent of a comic book narrative, with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end - a hero and an enemy who are somewhat caricatured.

This video is heavily narrative based, providing a sense of escapism for the audience. It is in accordance to Andrew Goodwin's music video theory, as there are multiple close ups of the main artist/singer's face. There is a clear representation of lyrics, but rather than having a literal representation, the director has decided to use more direct means of addressing the audience, creating a self-contained story.  The video is a hybrid of linear narrative and performance, but focusing heavily on the romance narrative elements. The audience of this video are the observers, who get to experience the romance unfold, and the target audience would be male and female equally due to its themes of love- primarily middle classed young adults, who would come under the Aspirer psychometric.

There is a clear opposition in mise-en-scene throughout this video, with a stark contrast between the naturalistic, beige and brown tones of the cafe, and the contrasting black and white of the pencil sketches. This creates a literal escape from reality - the neutral colours give an impression of a mundane setting, whereas the drawing is extremely visually impressive.

Costumes are casual, yet stylish, and befitting of the New Wave genre, and helps accentuate the importance of the animation elements-  they are not presenting themselves as particularly flashy. This is something I wish to achieve in my video, to not overshadow my animation elements.

The way performance and narrative are hybridised in this video, as well as the style itself of cartoon interacting with reality - is very influential to how I wish to approach making my music video. Obviously, my scale is much smaller, and I will be avoiding the rotoscoping process as it is much more complex than what I can achieve, but it creates an exciting mise-en-scene that I wish to reproduce in my video, and I may choose to make intertextual links to this video (for example, my main character could look through a comic-book, similar to the one in the video) as it is an extremely influential video in the world of animation and music.

Generic Research - Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #1

 Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #1 - Fell in Love With A Girl - The White Stripes

The White Stripes “Fell in Love with A Girl” music video, which is well known as being a masterpiece of stop motion. It is a fun, ingenious music video that utilises stop-motion animation entirely through LEGO bricks. The video itself is extremely abstract, using only red, blue, yellow, black, and white bricks, with the classic rectangular LEGO shape – so no special parts such as minifigures or bevelled bricks.

The camera is static throughout the whole video, and camera movements are simulated only by moving LEGO bricks. Occasionally, match cuts are used to hide the transitions between different styles as well. Due to the movement of the two-dimensional blocks, the images are very hectic and lively, but still provides the typical stop-motion appearance with the flickering of the camera and the slight imperfections in the bricks.

The video itself is almost entirely performance based but has a very slight element of narrative in the beginning that sets up the entire video. It briefly shows a little boy – the director’s son- building a wall of LEGO bricks. This is the only scene in the video that shows anything other than LEGO bricks, and very briefly creates a narrative – these bricks are meant to be the creation of a child, or more accurately, are fun and meaningless in nature, simply meant to create an interesting visual effect. The video also follows a cyclical structure in the sense that the boy creates a black screen of bricks and the video ends on a black screen as well. The simple technique of narrative creation used in this video is very inspiring and has highlighted the importance of getting my narrative elements across in as short a time as possible.

Importantly to my research, the video upholds a very solid brand identity with their use of colour – staying entirely within the brand identity of Jack and Meg White’s signature red, black and white. While this is seemingly a simple design choice it greatly influences the mise-en-scene of the video creating bold, striking visual effects that are befitting of the White Stripe’s music and genre.