2. There are many recurrent themes in music videos, all of which come together to produce the overall product. It is important that these themes coincide with the narrative, otherwise they wouldn’t really make any sense or fit the video. One of the themes is fragmentation of the body. This is usually either one of two things – close ups of the body, or the body being obscured my objects.
3. Aspects of mystery and mythical things are also often used. This includes gothic themes/scenes (bottom left), make believe/fairy-tale places (top right) and post apocalyptic scenes, i.e. after the world has “ended” (top right).
4. Horror is often used to evoke a sense of negativity/scariness. This is done by using depictions of hell through thins such as extreme violence (top and bottom right) and ‘monsters’ (top and bottom left).
5. To remind the viewers that the music video is only a made up situation, directors will often incorporate aspects of intertextuality, which includes shots of the cameras filming the video (above left), the artist, the artist looking at themselves (typically in a mirror – below right), appearances of the director themselves, shots of the set (top right) and so on.
6. Ritual celebration is used to emphasise happy emotions. This involves, a lot of the time, scenes of parties in places like the beach (top left) and on the street (bottom left). It also challenges the pre-modern representation of black people, and portrays them as happy (top right), whilst white people are usually demonic (bottom left – as shown in the mise en scene).
7. Sequences that are literally impossible to create in real life are frequently used to simply make music videos more interesting and worth re-viewing. Things that illustrate this include animation (top left), fast/slow motion (top right), and severe use of special effects (bottom right).
8. Breaks in the narrative are used to fragment the story line, perhaps to keep the readers engaged and make them want to see what happens in the end. This is done with things like clips of the film that the song is from (top left), clips of the band performing live (top right), shots into bright light (bottom left), etc.
