Conventions: Form

When researching music videos and planning my own, I started to look at the typical conventions of music videos. I have research this heavily as I feel knowing the conventions of a music video will help me greatly when deciding what shots to do and how to make my product look more professional. Specific genres do however break these conventions such as the genre I will be focusing on, Indie. They break conventions to create an original or new look to the video, it also adds a unique style, and personally I will most probably break conventions but I feel like I still need to know what the conventions are to ensure I do not twist them to far or break a convention that would help me out when producing my video.

The general conventions of a music video across most if not all genres are:

• Artist being featured
• Performance (Differs depending on genre) 
• Close-ups of artists or the narrative focus
• Shot length is often short, but is dependent on the beat of the song
• Rhythmic editing
• Mise-en-scene: Locations, costume and props change frequently
• Cinematography: establishing-shots, mid-shots, low and high angles, high amounts of camera movement, close-ups etc.
• A narrative,pure abstract, or performance, many videos feature more than one
• Editing is fast paced, and is often more interesting than cuts for example fades, slow motion etc.  
• Most videos offer no other sound but non-diegetic sound of the song, however sound breaks are used rarely depending on the artist.