Reflecting back on the AS year: What I learned about music videos in AS for A2

Going a few months back to June of this year, I remember having a discussion and sharing ideas on 'music videos' with my AS class. We were shown how to analyse a music video properly from the start to finish and how to break it down into a specific genre and also highlighting the main points in the video that lead us into finding the specific genre it falls under and what makes it belong to that genre

We looked at stereotypical, event and successful music videos. A stereotypical music video that we looked at and analysed was 'video killed the radio star' as that is what is considered to be the first music video and we compared it to a few modern music videos and noticed how the technology has evolved (camera work and ideas mainly). Event music videos are videos that have a big budget, a good example I saw was Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' music video, which is fourteen minutes long and cost $5000,000 to produce. Last but not least successful music videos are ones that have been overly hyped (mostly through social media) or have a comedic purpose to it, a great example of this is 'Gangnam style', which also reigns as being the top music video in the world.

Also we analysed several videos and applied everything we had learn and made notes on the Mise-en-scene, special effects, lip synching, generic signifiers and structure. I analysed a video by 'the 1975' and had to talk about the genre they fit into, whic is Indie rock and we can tell this by the way they are dressed (similar colour scheme:black) and by the way they are performing (by playing live instruments). We also looked at another music video as a group and made a Prezi, showing how we analysed the video. See Prezi below.