Notes on Narrative:

The use of narrative in music videos is used to give a repeatability factor to the video as they often do not give a detailed storyline but are non-linear and usually leave it up to the audience to suggest the story behind it. It is common in music videos to have a narrative factor in conjunction with some performance from the artist, and as Steve Archer states in 'Teaching Music Videos', "additionally, a carefully choreographed dance might be a part of the artist's performance or an extra aspect of the video designed to aid visualisation and the 'repeatability' factor. There are some examples of a mixture of narrative and performance based videos below.

 

 

Below is a music video of Ke$ha's which is completley narrative but is very different to other videos as it is made up solely of photographs showing how the storyline progresses. This is likely to appeal to her teenage target audience as it is a bit out there and fun, giving it the repeatability factor.

 

My music video will be 100% narrative because it has a very strong storyline that has to take up the whole 3:44 minutes. Also if there was a performance aspect in it it wouldn't fit the mood and style of the video and the feelings of the main character. I am including narrative because it appeals to the target audience as it provides a plot to follow along to.

 

The cast will be Beth as mentioned before who is meant to be Ellie Goulding. However, taking the audience feedback into consideration from my first draft, I have decided to film some more to add in to the end part of the music video, using my friend Natalie, who will act as a comforting friend to Beth and help her get over the death of her boyfriend. In order to make it more clear that Beth is missing somebody at the beginning of the music video, I am thinking of having a flashback of her recieving some sort of letter and looking at a photograph of a boy in military uniform.

 

The majority of the narrative in my video is linear to some extent, because it is mostly in order of events that occur in her life, but there are a lot of elipsises to show that time has moved on, and I do this by using cross disolve transitions for example. I'm also implementing flashbacks into it, to mix it up a bit to ensure that the audience will remain interested throughout the duration of the video and will want to watch it again.