Research; narrative, concept, performance

As we've been looking at performance, narrative and concept video's I thought I should do a post solely on the three types of music video.

Narrative:

A narrative music video is a video that tells a certain story to the audience throughout the music video. 
It has to be done in a way that makes the story easy to grasp for the audience and not too fast or too large a story to fit into the music video.
Although the story isn't always shown chronologically, it's often shown in a way which is clear for the audience to understand whats going on.

Narrative music video's don't always follow the narrative theories of some theorists;

Todorov; some music video's do follow Todorovs theory that a story should follow the lines of 'Equilibrium, disequilibrium, recognition, reparation, new equilibrium' however some music video's don't - this is because there isn't much time throughout the time of a music video to fit all these aspects of an entire story into it so sometimes certain aspects are left out.

Propp; There are often still stereotypical characters in music video's, which fits in with Propp's character theories which is interesting. In fact often in music video's the characters are over exaggerated as the audience need to be able to identify who they are and what their character is like in a period of a few seconds to understand the narrative throughout the music video.

Levi Strauss; Again some music videos strongly follow Levi's idea of binary oppositions creating a story, especially narrative music videos as there's often a story being told of romance with a protagonist and antagonist. 

Here's a pretty good example, it's '18 and life' by 'skid row', although it's not only narrative as it has performance too - it's a clear narration and easy to follow.




Concept:

A concept video is a video that has no specific storyline that it's telling to it's audience, but more like an idea that it follows or picks up on in different ways throughout the video. 
Concept video's can be mixed with performance and narrative but are often just simply concept. 

As I've been watching concept videos there doesn't seem to be a particular genre uses concept in it's video, there are a wide range of music genres that use concept in a variety of different ways.

A lot of concept videos seem to be of an unusual an obscure concept, seemingly abstract for the audience to be drawn in and want to watch the video fully without taking their eyes off the screen as it's not predictable and they want to see what will come on the screen next. 

Here's my example; 'genesis - land of confusion'... A really creepy video, but a concept video nonetheless! 





Performance:

A performance music video is a video where, not necessarily the band, but anyone is performing the song. 
It can be the band performing the song on a stage - or the characters lip syncing the song, or even a number of different people in the narrative performing it. There are a huge number of ways performance can be added into a music video. 
Quite often performance is mixed with concept or narrative - but it can also be a solely performance music video. 
Performance of the band in a music video is helpful for the band as their audience will relate to them due to knowing what they look like. If you never see a band or artist in their video's it may not be as easy to become a devoted fan. 

So my example is 'one voice - Barbra Streisand' - i've never listened to Barbra Streisand purposely before, and I thought this was such an amazing music video/ short video. Not only a music video but a promotional video for a great cause!