media coursework

1. CODE &
CONVENTIONS OF A
POP MUSIC VIDEO

2. CONVENTIONS
■Bright colours
■Colourful clothes
■Make up
■Having fun – Partying/ Drinking/ Dancing
■Attractive people
■Loud/ Bubbly/ bold people
These kind of music videos are made to look like a fantasy world such at Katy
Perry with her song ‘California girls’. Katy’s music video is crazy and
outrageous such as having things made out of candy and her being able to
float in pink clouds with bright coloured hair which is a typical kind of music
video with the genre of pop.

3. MORE CONVENTIONS OF
POP
More conventions of a pop music video is that it tends to follow the
stereotypes of other videos, it doesn’t often have independent
different music videos.
Pop videos are normally one of the most heard genres of music on
the radio such as kiss and capital, as they have a much larger
audience than rock and indie music, which have a lot more unique
songs compared to pop. Where as pop just carry's on the rhythm and
contentions of another pop song.
The genre of a song can be shown through the music video for
example by the use of bright blood colours seen in another one of
Katy Perry song Last Friday night.

4. HAIR AND MAKEUP
CONVENTIONS
In current day the hair and makeup in a pop music video is over the
top and crazy such as massive hairstyles colourful hair foe example
Nick Minaj in Super bass, this helps to fit the convention of a music
video being over the top and crazy.

5. THE CHANGE IN THE PAST 10
YEARS
However hair and makeup has had a dramatic change as crazy hair
and makeup wasn’t used back in the day they kept it more minimal as
there was no need to be outrageous but as there are lots of pop
videos now. Artists now try to compete with each other to get the
craziest pop video.

6. TYPICAL CAMERA WORK
USED
The camera uses a lot of close ups and extreme close ups in order to
highlight the voyeuristic aspects of women as they are typically
represented in pop culture. Examples of these would be close-up's of
cleavage, lips and bums. Pop videos typically use ideas from the work
of Laura Mulvey who said that women are purely used for sexual
gratification or merely to interrupt the narrative, this is called the
male gaze.

7. CAMERA MOVEMENTS
Tracking shots and motivating editing are used throughout a pop
video as the whole video is based around the artist to show they are
the main focus in the video. Panning is also used when the artist
changes around from scene to keep the camera on the artist.

8. REPRESENTATION
Women in pop videos are represented in a negative way such as sex
symbols rather than artists, which follows Mulveys theory of the male
gaze. This continues through the rest of the artists life until they are
classed as ‘too old’. An example of this is Britney Spears with her
song ‘Hit me baby one more time’ she is dressed in a school girl
outfit with a short skirt and her top rolled up to show a sexy school
girl look which follows the representation of women in the music
industry from 90’s.
Before the 90’s there was less of a need to dress provocatively, where
was today such as Miley Cyrus seem to be ‘forced’ into wearing more
and more revealing clothes.

9. INTERTEXTUALITY
This is the way one media text can refer to another and is about how
music videos draw upon existing texts in order to spark recognition
from the audience. An example of this is In the 1980’s Madonna’s
video for ‘Material Girl’ drew inspiration from ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s
Best Friend; a film from the 1950’s. Another pop music video is Lady
GAGA in her song ‘Paparazzi’ where she features real headlines and
articles in her music video.