Research for Music Video: Carol Vernali's theory

Carol Vernallis studied the edition and camera work closely in music videos. She began to observe that the edits formed in music videos where much more frequent than that that may appear within films. This made her believe that they stood out more as disjuncture and that the editing seemed to have a rhythmic basis that related closely with the song. As I previously mentioned having a clear rhythm editing pattern is one of the factors that makes a good music video as well as another.

Some of her observations are that jump cuts are often used in which two particular shots may not directly flow for example someone holding a mug then the next shot would be them drinking from it. We wouldn’t see the transformation from of the mug from the table to the person’s mouth. Another of her ideas was a master shot (base track) which are frequently used to give the video a structure. Furthermore the camera may move in time with the music, obvious edits such as wipes or special effects and the rule of continuity may be broken to draw more attention to what is on the screen.

Some examples of videos that illustrate her ideas are:

JUMP CUT- At 0.30 seconds you see the ball on the ground rolling towards his feet then at 0.32 seconds you see the ball in his hand this can be seen as a jump cut because we don’t actually see him bend down and pick up the ball.

SPECIAL EFFECTS ADDED- At the beginning you can see that the artist has used a little girl to resemble her for the opening of the music video as the little girl sits crossed legged then gets up to walk around the big teddy bear situated in the middle of the scene then the young girl gradually turns into the artist (Jessie J) as she walks to the other side of the teddy bear. The video on a whole is rather ‘animated’.

BASE TRACK-Throughout the beginning of the music video the base track and the flashing lights as well as the woman banging on the drums matched. This allowed the music video to perform a good structure and it flowed quite nicely. The most interesting part would be when the number 32 transformed as crackling ice from beneath the ground and you could actually hear the transformation.