Key Ingredients To A Successful Music Video

Good location

A good location will compliment the video making it look interesting this will help to keep the audience hooked as they are watching the singer and the location the whole time.

Strong performance 

For any successful video to succeed it will need to have preformers who look the part, they must be in time, sharp and powerful so that it looks professional. 

Range of shots

Different shots such as close up, extreme close up, medium and long shots will help to make the video seem worth watching, it will allow the audience to feel involved and keep them hooked. Likewise it will give us a the ability to view the location from a variety of ways.

JAY Z Ft. Swizz Beatz - Onto The Next One

The video for JAY Z's "Onto The Next One" is one shot entirely in black and white. This is another video which relies heavily on the editing. The quick cuts between different objects on the screen is what makes the video so good. Throughout the video we see different objects over a blank screen. These objects are linked with the lyrics being said at the time, this is why the cuts are so quick and so frequent. The video could be described as an abstract one as the meaning of most of the symbols and objects seen in the video are not immediately obvious and cut away so quick that the viewer does not have time to try and work out what it is. This is a deliberate editing technique which will make the viewer go back and annotate the video on a much deeper level and make their own interpretations of what they think the meaning of these symbols are

Tyler, The Creator - Yonkers

In 2011, Tyler, The Creator released the video for his track "Yonkers". This video was praised by fans and critics for it's bold approach. The video is entirely in black and white and uses mostly mid shots of Tyler sitting on a stool in a blank room. A noticeable camera technique used in the video is the use of out of focus shots. The camera often moves out of focus of Tyler which gives the video an almost horror movie like vibe to it which would make sense given the content of the video (Tyler eating the cockroach, the black eyes and then eventually killing himself). Also, the use of silhouettes is effective. We first see this used when Tyler throws up after eating the cockroach and then when we see his legs struggling after he hangs himself. Another thing to note about the video is that it is shot in one entire shot, there is no cuts throughout the video.

Kanye West Ft. Rihanna & Kid Cudi - All Of The Lights

The video for Kanye West's "All of the Lights" is a visually minimal, very fast paced video which is very effective as the song itself is quick tempo. The video uses a lot of quick cuts to match the speed of the song. The editing mainly consists of quick cuts between varied fonts of different colours which depict the lyrics of the song or other things (e.g. the artist's name). However, when an artist is performing onscreen, they are in front of a black screen letting off a white light with strobe lights (either white or varying colours) being placed on them. The editing style of the video was also inspired by the opening to the 2009 French film "Enter The Void".

Music Video Evaluation

"Unfuckwittable" Ft. Aos Alaa


For our 20 second music video we chose the Kid Cudi track "Unfuckwittable" because it had a good intro to the song which could be complimented with well edited visuals. Because the track is a slow paced song we decided we were going to use slow paced visuals which is why we used slow motion for all the shots. Since there are no actual lyrics in the opening of the song, instead a vocal sample, we focused more on the visuals complementing and matching the actual sound of the music rather than focusing on the performance of the song and lip syncing. We used just one frame throughout; extreme close up, which along with the slow motion, looks very good against the slow, almost mysterious sounds of the track.We also used a quick cut to black shot in the middle of the sequence with a small red text of the song's title. The red on black colour way was a deliberate choice along with having the title relatively small because it fits with the theme of the song. Overall, the decison to use only one framing technique and only two shots for the whole sequence worked effectively because it leaves the audience wanting more and wanting to see how the rest of the video would look once the main part of the songs starts and how the song is performed throughout the rest of the video.

TE$T

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