Brief history of music videos

1920s - surprisingly videos have been made to accompany music as far back as the 1920s. Many jazz musicians of the time, including Bessie Smith, made short films to accompany their songs.
1965 - 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' is widely credited as being the first music video. The short segment was made for D.A Pennebaker's film, 'Don't look back'
1970s - record companies discovered TV shows as a great way to promote artists. These began to include short 'promos' to replace live performances.
1975 - 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was a groundbreaking video released by Queen at the beginning of the music video era. It is considered one of the first to use advanced visual effects.
1981 - MTV, the first TV channel dedicated to showing music videos, began broadcasting in New York.

'Ed Sheeran - A Team' Music video analysis

The video fits into the Acoustic/Pop genre. The video doesn’t have typical pop genre conventions, for example, it doesn’t show the singer playing live or close-ups of the singer, in fact, the artist doesn’t even appear in the video.

The video fits into the illustration category because even though the artist doesn’t feature in the video, the lyrics support the narrative in the visuals.

The camera is handheld and shaking throughout the video. This gives the video a more personal feel, making the video feel low budget even though it’s a mainstream pop/acoustic video. This personal feel is also very untypical of a pop music video because they are normally big budget with huge camera movement, for example jib or crane camera angles.

The editing of Ed Sheeran’s video is very minimalistic. The video doesn’t have any blatant transitions, again, untypical of pop videos.

We can’t tell that any special effects are used apart from a black and white filter added to the video. The black and white effect adds an amateur feel to the video unlike typical pop music videos.

The Mise en scene in the video is simple. The locations are in public, for example, the park, the street. Other locations in the videos include in buildings and rooms. In the narrative the character is a prostitute (we assume) the clothes she’s wearing match this typical style (leather and ripped clothes).

The light in the video tends to be dark and hard to see, it’s also harder to tell what lighting is used by the black and white effect used.

Categories of music videos

Illustration - either a straightfoward performance video or a simple narrative video (or mixture of the two) that illustrates the meaning of the lyrics and visualises the music in a straightforward way. It could be called music video 'denotation'. A good example of a classic mixed narrative/ performance video is Bruno Mars -'Just the way you are'. The artist, Bruno Mars, sings to his girlfriend and the narrative shows his love for her, the use of the cassette tape in the video is very creative and also links to the lyrics of the song.




Amplification - the conventions demonstrated by the music video 'auteur' or creative director. She/he may use both performances and narrative, however, rather than simply illustrate the lyrics or sounds this director will 'amplify' both with creative interpretation, unusual ideas and surrealistic approaches. There is still a direct link to the song, whether it is the beat, sound or 'connotative' link to part of the lyrics or song title. A example of a amplification music video is arctic monkey's 'Brainstorm', the video does have slight performance and narrative, however the movement of the girls and light shows the beat of the music and there are also unusual images associated with the brain.



Disjuncture - also created by 'auteur' directions these videos are completely abstract and have no obvious link to the music, lyrics, song title, or artist. In this sense they are a point of 'disjuncture' from the song. Daft Punk's 'Da Funk' is a classic example of a disjuncture music video, it features a man with a dog mask on walking through New York city, there is no relation to the music, lyrics, song title or artist.

Notes from Initial planning

At our first meeting we made some initial ideas of what to do fora music video. First of all, we all decided we wanted to create a pop music video. This is because although there are many other genres we thought pop would have been easiest to convey typical conventions. However, we decided we would still research the other genres.

In our initial meeting we also made a spider diagram of what we needed to create our music video. For example, props, list of of possible actors etc.

Finally in first meeting, we discussed what video each of us liked and wanted to research and possibly analyse further. We came up with three videos, Ed Sheeran - A team, One Republic - Secrets and Rihanna - Unfaithful. Since the meeting we've analysed all of there videos.

Goodwin's music video analysis

1. Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics.


2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals.


3. There is a relationship between music and visuals.


4. The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist so that the artist may develop motifs.


5. There is frequent reference to the notion of looking (screens with screens, telescopes etc) and particularly the voyeuristic treatment of women's bodies.


6. There are often intertextual references to films, TV, programmes. other music videos etc.