Styles – Narrative

The styles of music videos will differ dependant on the genre of the music and the artists individual style.

A narrative video is a very common style used in modern music videos. The video follows a storyline, connecting to the lyrics of the music. A narrative video can make the song more powerful, showcasing the points and emotions through characters, it helps the audience understand the origins and meaning of the artists music. The music video can either follow a liner storyline, starting at the beginning, going through the middle and finishing at the end. Or the video can have more of a fragmented non-linear aspect to the story,  where the storyline takes place at different times in the video. Or a more common use of non-linear music video are ones that shows a reverse narrative, and has the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end. Often in narrative music videos the band or artist will feature in the story, even tough them don’t perform, placing their face to the video, will help advertise the video and can help  the record become more successful.

Narrative style music video follow codes and conventions. ‘Propp’s character roles,’ claims that characters in a story could be fitted into eight characters roles. The first role is the ‘The Hero’ who is the main protagonist, that many motivated by the lack of some and usually seeks out something or someone within the story. ‘The Villain’ is the opposite to the the hero with evil plans. ‘The Princess’ is often very attractive and

One comment

  1. Xanvier, you need to start to embed the videos you have chosen and discuss them individually (try to choose diverse genres). You have split the sections up correctly and started to talk about relevant style, conventions and techniques but for the time you have had you should have done more by now… Also your analysis thus far is a bit superficial because you haven’t drilled down to individual examples.

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