Narrative Music Video

A narrative music video is one which uses a story line; this story could relate directly to the lyrics or to just an idea of the song. Lots of these kinds of music videos use the artists as the characters. This helps to advertise the artist’s image and it can also promote them as a particular stereotype, such as being the hero. The use of editing can help to encourage the audience to watch the video to the end to find out what happens to the characters. This makes the music video like a short film. Often theses will contain a love story often with action dominated by males and females who passively react or wait for something to happen.

Rihannas’s Music video ‘Man down’ is an example of a narrative based music video

 

This video is a typical example of a Narrative based music video that follows all the conventions especially the idea of a love story and being action dominated from the very beggining of the music video, the fact that there is no music present in the beggining of the video also gives away that the video is a narrative based music video.