Music Video Conventions

We completely finished our commercial project. For our first project I think my group did well with this project. While we were finishing up editing (our last day working on the commercial), we started to experience controversy. We had a problem with agreeing on some final decisions/changed for the commercial. We solved this problem by asking for our peers opinion on different scenes and shots. Overall, I felt that the commercial went smoothly, and our commercial came out better than I thought.  I believe that this is because when decided to go out and get extra footage, on our optional filming day. We did this because we felt that even though we followed the story board, we felt that we did not have enough footage to meet the time requirement.

My class has now moved onto a new project, a music video. In this project, I will need to get in a group of 1-4 students, choose a song, and then plan and film a music video outside of school. I chose to work with a semi-new group for this project. I am working with one of my teammates from my last project, but my other teammate had joined from another group. Before we came to class today, our teacher wanted us to already have our group and song in mind. So knowing that we needed to pick a song, I started looking at some sample music videos made by students for a school project. I found an extremely funny music video to the song plug walk, in laughter I sent it to my teammate Montana to start brainstorming ideas. She loved the video just as much as I did, so we started to think of songs like Plug Walk to use. Montana came up with the song Ballin’ and after listening to it I agreed that we should use it. We chose a song in this Rap and R&B genre, because we thought it would be fun to film and this way we could use Montana’s car in the music video. We could also dress all “dropped out” or rich.

 My group and I researched conventions of a Rap or R&B music video. We watched a few music videos and saw many repeated conventions. The camera angles that were commonly used were low angles to show the rapper, high angles to show their location, wide shot to show them bragging about their things, and close ups which would usually show detail on their wealth. The movement is not specific but they had a lot of zig zagging, pan shots, and tracking shots. These movements helped to make the scene more dramatic. The sound would be the song they are promoting in the music video. They also might have diegetic sound relating to where the scene takes place. We saw many transitions such as fade, dissolve, and rotation. In an editing perspective, they edit the sound in after filming the video so the sound is more clear and loud. They also insert text into the video during the editing process to inform people the name and artist of the song. Then at the end they insert the credits which include the people that helped with the production of the video. 

There is many examples of Mise En Scene in music videos. While researching we found that most of their costumes deal with big fur coats or leather jackets with expensive accessories to show their wealth. They usually take place outside or at night clubs so the lighting would be either natural lighting or strobe lights. While researching we noticed that they did not wear extravagant makeup and if they did wear makeup it was natural, and something they would wear on a normal basis. For their hair the guys sometimes would wear durags and the girls would have straight or wavy hair, or braids. During the video they use many props such as expensive cars, drinks, and money. The setting would usually be on the street, open area, night clubs, mansions, neighborhoods, and/or casinos.