Research for Music Video: Carol Vernallis

Carol Vernallis, who is the author of Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (2004) and also a journalist, has extensively studied editing and camerawork in music videos and has some to the conclusion that edits in music videos are more frequent than in film or TV. Furthermore, she believes that many edits in videos stand out as disjucture and they have a rhythmic basis closely connected to the beat of the song. Personally, I agree with Vernallis in her theory, as there are many videos which prove this. Here are a few examples of some.

As you can see, Kelly Rowland - Commander ft David Guetta and Eve - Tambourine demonstrate her main ideas. Which are as follows:

- The usual rules of continuity are broken, to draw attention to what is on screen. In Tambourine there is a variety of different shots of Eve in different costume, and she continually uses jump cuts to different scenes in the video, and usually it cuts back to a master shot (base track) to give the video a structure.

- The edits are really obvious and they are used to draw attention to the artists, such as special effects. In Commander, they edited it to make two of her and she is mainly in the music video, which really draws attention to her and promotes her as an artist. Also, when she is dancing, the camera moves in time with the music, typical of a music video.

Until then!

Stephanie