Conventions of a music video

Camera Shots

The most common camera shots used in music videos are, long shots, close up and mid shots. These shots are often used to create emphasis on the artist, location and emotions.

Close ups are used to show emotions of characters in the video and also to help refelct the words of the song.

Camera Movement

Editing

The most popular editing technique for music videos is jump cuts, this technique is when there is a sudden jump between scenes/shots.

Also many different transitions are often used such as wipe, disslove etc as this adds different effects to the scenes.

Props

These are often used in music videos to add significance to different objects and help aid different parts of the scene to make them look more realistic.

Lighting

There are many different types of lighting in music videos it often depends on the genre of music. Artificial lighting is used to give the artists or other people in the video look more enhanced, or make them stand out seem more significant.

For Example:

In Indie/rock music there seems to be a lot of low key lighting.

In Indie Folk music there is different types low and high key lighting depending on the mood of the song.

Sound

In a music video the sound is mainly the song/backing track or vocals of the song.

Sometimes there is different sounds if the music video is made into a short film. For Example: Michael Jackson - Thriller music video the producers made the music video into a short film.

Costume

The costume differs due to the mood of the song and costume also reflects the genre.

Audience can be influenced by the artist's costume because they may see the artist as a role model.

Colour

Colours are often used to set the mood of the music video. Hip hop and pop songs tend to have a brighter colour theme throughout the music video but in rock/metal songs seem to have a darker colour scheme running through them.