Understanding the styles, Conventions, and techniques of Music videos

Music video's often usually have a certain style or theme to appeal to their target audience regardless of what genre the song is. Sometimes you may see a music video shot like a film telling a story rarely cutting to the person singing/rapping taking part or playing a roll in the story or you may watch a music video where the song is being preformed live. These are two different ways some artists can go about shooting their music videos, either in-concert live footage or in specific locations related to the story of the song. Sometimes music videos use both live performance and story telling technique and cut between the two styles of footage.  There are also other ways too like computerized animation or CGI animation and all sorts of other ways depending on how creative the producer can be.

Here is a music video by B.o.b that is completely made up of stop motion.



This video is completely made up of stop motion. The animation technique that was used through out the video for this video is call cut out animation. Although the video is stop motion animation, it still has a series of technical shots and camera angles in a certain order maintain the videos theme and also to tell the story of the main character as he expresses how he feels about a girl. The speed of the animation movements look like they have been edited to match the beat of the song making the song more interesting and catchy for the audience.

In this video, Limp Bizkit use a green screen and stationary motorbikes to relate to his lyric "My way or the high way".



This video is mostly made up of 5 different locations in terms of footage and story and is arithmetically edited (cut the the beat) and pieced together with a series of different shot angles to suit the songs semi-aggressive theme. The song seems like its about a relationship problem and the protagonist expressing his solution to the problem. I thing the cave men footage of the video is symbolism to represent either the main characters survival on his own or  possibly how he feels with his partner. The influence for this music video and song could have been a personal experience he had himself or the idea probably came from a movie or Tv show.

This is a recent music video by Jay-Z and Kanye West. This music video is live footage throughout



The footage used in this music video was from a live performance from more than one angle. The music video looks like live footage pieced together with a few visual effects and a few titles like the beginning titles "Kanye""Jay""Paris" and for the chorus "That Shit Crey". The story of this song doesn't seem to have much of a narrative, Just two people escaping to paris. The lyrics from both artists are the most important and meaningful things in this video as they sometimes may have more that on interpretation.