Carol Vernallis-The Conventions

 The what done right

Carol Vernallis is a media theorist who works in discovering meaning and depth behind music and music videos, she has a number of works about this topic.

She looks at a variety of factors when analysing a music video some of which we have looked at before in different contexts such as continuity and relationships between sound and video, meaning of editing etc.

A lot of ideas that she uses come from four categories that we look at when not only creating a music video but when we analyse one too. I'll cover her ideas briefly and what we can take away from these ideas when we make our own music video.

The first one of the ideas to discuss is her thoughts on camera work. Vernallis theorised the primary reason of having close-up shots of artists or the bands with in videos at the frequency in which it becomes almost common enough for a cliché is because it highlights the importance of the artists themselves but also it draws more attention to the way that they look in the video itself.

From this we can take and understand that camera work shows a bigger significance to music videos and the ideas presented from them, it highlights that stars play a big role in music video production as they are the USP for the production. It also helps for the audience to connect with the video as it's closer to the artist themselves and draws them in more as who their viewign is able to relate to the period of whenever its set as there's that additional layer of connectivity.

One of the big theories of everything media is continuity editing, now what this is is the idea that most videos will have smooth transitions or something to that in order to keep the audience involved with the narrative of the visuals on screen so that the audience avoids disassociation.

Carol Vernallis actually covered this idea in her writing ‘The Kindest Cuts: Functions and Meaning of Music Video Editing'​ where she talks about the idea of why there's limited to no continuity editing for music videos, and I think this quote demonstrates this point: "Perhaps music videos avoid continuity editing because such techniques would give the visual track too strong a forward trajectory the image might seem to overtake the song" (The Kindest Cuts: Functions and Meaning of Music Video Editing Page 3, line 5) I think this is a good argument as mst forms of media such as videos have what's called encoded information which the audience decodes inorder to get the meaning of what's been seen, understanding this point helps us for we come around to making our own video. It tells us from a quite reliable source that we need to be careful about the type of edits and transitions that we use as the amount of information being directed at the audience, but also that t can take away from the main purpose of the video which is to promote the song.

So this along with other points that Vernallis makes are almost like a tutorial in helping people to develop their own videos in a better way. From edits and how camera works to an idea of star iconography referenced in the same work it helps us to get a bigger and better understanding of what goes into the production of a music video and how we then interpret the visuals that we have seen.
The article was originally released back in 2001 which means that some of its ideas may be old, such as actually the idea of avoiding continuity edits. Before we saw that Vernallis spoke about makers employing them rarely as their use could lead to an overwhelming amount of information for the audience and instead stated this "Unlike films, music videos frequently intentional disjunctive cuts."  (The Kindest Cuts: Functions and Meaning of Music Video Editing Page 5, Paragraph 3, Line 1) We know that this is interpretation is considered outdated as both film and music videos employ the opposite when it suits thr right purpose of the media product a good example of this in film is from Inception (seen below) the editing technique may be used to a different effect but the sharpness of the cuts to vastly different paces of scenes does show a form of disjunctive cuts can lead to audience disassociation with the scene as it breaks a traditional rule of continuity as there's no smoothness between each cut.

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Here's a second case disproving the idea, in this music video from Duke Dumont we can see that actually there's a large amount of continuity within this video and actually it's not all that overwhelming for the audience as every shot matches well to a lyric and work well together to create an all around good music video. There are cuts within this yes but they are a part of the scene being played out and all it does is change the position of the camera in order to give the audience developed meanings behind the intentions of the artisit and song therefore making a strong case for this argument being an outdated point as there are more examples of this idea of continuity editing through the industry in the past 15 or so years.

 

References

functions-and-meanings-of-music-video-editing.pdf (wordpress.com)

Carol Vernallis- Functions and meanings of music video editing (slideshare.net) for camera work.

Carol Vernallis (slideshare.net) Scan readign for any details missed.