Thursday, 13 June 2013

Sophie. Music Video Analysis 1.



NARRATIVE.
Taylor Swift- Love Story.

In this music video, we are faced with a typical love story in a fairy-tale setting. The location itself is a huge castle, surrounded by trees and bathed in sunlight. This creates a fairy-tale image, relating to stories such as "Cinderella" or "Sleeping Beauty". This demonstrates the innocent, girly image Taylor and her label want to create. Fairy tales are usually aimed towards young girls and can follow them well into their teens, so we can assume that the target audience is also females aged 8 to 18. Its a little girls fantasy in music video form.

Taylor and the other actors are dressed in elaborate old fashioned gowns and tuxes, along with props such as horses and fans and other locations such as hidden gardens. Taylor hides behind the fan in quite a few scenes, illustrating innocents and subtlety. This reflects the type of love being shown in this narrative video. The video over-all is very feminine.

The whole theme and look of this video reflects the classic Shakespeare play "Romeo and Juliet". The song itself makes many literal references to the play with lines such as "Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone" and "My daddy said stay away from Juliet".

Other lyrics to the song are also taken literally in the video such as "the flashbacks starts, I'm standing there on a balcony in summer air" where Taylor literal has a flashback and is shown standing on a balcony. Also "See the lights, the party,the ball gowns. See you make your way through the crowd and say hello..." which is then shown happening in the video. This narrative video is based very heavily on the lyrics

Lip syncing is used throughout when Taylor performs on the balcony during the music video. During the chorus the story of the lovers blossoms and is has faster paced editing. Were-as during the verses, its more story and performance based. Towards the end the songs tempo changes and Taylor and "Romeo" run towards each other relating to the beat of their running and their hearts at that moment. It shows their emotion at that particular moment.

Unlike most of Taylor other videos, this video is very Taylor based. Her band is not shown and a lot of screen time is taken by her. This helps promote her and fulfils the Record Labels demand.

As scenes change, the windows of the castle and the balcony are used as notions of looking. They also help with the editing of the present time and the flashbacks. No voyeurism is used here except small intimate touches once again relating to Taylors innocent image and young audience.

This video demonstrates a narrative music video perfectly as, just like the title, it tells a love story. Taylor comes from a major label so its easy to identify the image they are trying to create and the audience they are trying to attract.

By completing this task I gained insight on what a narrative video would look like. This inspired ideas for our own video. Also it allowed me to see Goodwin's theory applies to all videos.










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