Analyse Music Video in Terms of Representation Theories

For my A2 production for Media 2012, I was part of a group that helped make a music video for the song “Never Again” by Meaning In Masterpiece.

The music video shows a young man’s mind trapped between moving on or not from this girl knows. The music video does not give away if this girl is still alive or not or even if it was his girlfriend or wife. The artist is shown to have several encounters with the girl but never getting a chance to interact with her. Our intentions were to make a video to contribute to the mood of the song and enhance the sympathy we wanted the audience to feel or the artists where possible. For example, we made a decision to make the whole video in black and white apart from the last clip. The last clip shows the artist moving on and we chose leave this in colour to show that he has finally moved on and he can free his mind from the girl.

In terms of representation when looking at existing product of the same genre, we have found that the codes and conventions we found was that enigma is a large factor along with symbolism and is important to the song to keep audiences entertained to watch the whole video to find out what happens. Colour filters are often used to create a certain atmosphere and together with close up and perhaps slow motion, can create a meaningful music video. These codes and conventions are what we conformed to, to create our A2 production.

Richard Dyer said “How we are seen determines how we are treated, how we treat others is based on how we see them. How we see them comes from representation”. We have used a black and white filter and close-ups of the artist to portray the emotions the artist is feeling and represent him as sad and forlorn. Representing our artist like this will get our audience to sympathise with him and his situation. This theory agrees with Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding theory. We have deliberately encoded feelings of sadness and mystery within the media texts for our audiences to decode and understand in their own way our message through our representations.

Roland Barthes’ semiotics theory explained that the use of signs and signifiers contribute towards representation. The girl in the video appears now and again and is portrayed as being related to the artist in some way but it is not made obvious as there is never any interaction between her and the artist. We have used the girl as a signifier to the audience that there is a meaning behind the girl’s appearances.

Using the black and white filter for the music video is a stereotypical ‘short-cut’ for the audience to realise and understand that this song is a sad song with a conflict going on. We have also subverted from the connotations of black and white being something is supposed to be clear and have added layers to the music video by not giving away the girl’s purpose.

In conclusion, our music video uses stereotypes and signifiers to make the representations of our character’s and their situation easier to understand for our audience.