Evaluate A2 production in terms of narrative theories

For my A2 production in Media 2012, I was part of a group that created a music video. The music video was for the song ‘Never Again’ by Meaning In Masterpiece. This song is from the Alternative genre and is played on an acoustic guitar. This is a sad sounding song so we came up with a fitting narrative to fit the mood.

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.

When looking at other Alternative styled music video, we found that they had slow edits, close-ups of people expressions and the video went back and forth evenly between the artist/band playing their instruments and the narrative. We took these themes and ideas and used them in our music video to conform to an Alternative styled music video. As this is a sad song, we tried to use these codes and conventions with a few ideas of our own such as black and white clips, slow motion and close-ups to evoke sympathy from our audiences.

Levi Strauss said that creating a conflict propels a narrative and that a narrative can only end on a resolution of this conflict. By making only the beginning and end clips in colour and the rest of the video in black and white, we attempt to show a conflict through visual contexts. Our artists is constantly seeing the same girl wherever he goes producing the idea that maybe he loves her in some way and by this we show a conflict through conceptual contexts. Only at the end does the artist resolve their conflict.

The enigma created by our music video doesn’t make for a closed narrative. As Roland Barthes said, we can start by looking at a narrative from one viewpoint but as more of the narrative unravels and you start pulling at different threads of this narrative, this can result in very different meanings. Some meanings of our music video maybe different to others who may have experienced what they think the artist has experienced, death of a loved one or a sad break up between a couple.

Although our music video conforms to theories such as Strauss’ and Barthes’ in terms of narrative, it does subvert from having certain archetypal characters in it. Todorov suggests that there should be a hero, villain and heroine. Arguably, it could be said that the hero is the artist and the heroine is the girl, however, there is no villain and the hero doesn’t get the girl at the end like a reward nor does she need saving.

In conclusion, the narrative of our music video does conform to having a conflict and resolution and conforms to the codes and conventions such as being enigmatic like other Alternative styled music video narratives to provide infinite meaning an audience can take away from it. The narrative subverts from having stereotypical characters but doesn’t need these to make a complete narrative. Nowadays, a narrative doesn’t even have to involve a proper ending for an audience to understand it and with this ever-changing way we perceive a narrative, it’s possible that you may not even need archetypal characters to tell it, as seen in our music video.