Post modernism

Post Modernism in terms of music videos basically shows the rejection of reality and a basic narrative and in its place has a mixture of different elements and ideas from other sources.

There are 4 main elements to Postmodernism which we have tried to incorporate into our music video:

Rejection of a linear narrative:

Linear narrative is where there is an obvious storyline from start to finish, for example: girl is alone, girl meets boy, and they fall in love, the end. In music videos encoders will try to reject this linear narrative to create a more engaging, interesting and creative production for the decoder. Our music video gives an ‘anti-narrative’ approach as it doesn’t have a solid storyline which is followed from start to finish. However we do create a story, well more of a fairytale where toys come alive by themselves, so we are presenting a story just not in a conventional way. Our video begins with a finger pressing an ‘on’ button then lights and toys come on by themselves presenting the idea of magic, we then follow this idea through to the end where the lights begin to turn off and the power is switched off. This creates an engaging production for our audience and fits well with the upbeat music and childlike lyrics. It also doesn’t present an obvious understanding from the audience, this means our audience will be more intrigued by this as they will try and figure out the meaning of using the toys therefore will have to watch it more than once which is what media encoders try to do.

Visual spectacle:

We have defiantly created a visual spectacle for our audience. As our video has no human characters apart from seeing someone’s finger at the start, this provides a fresh idea rarely used in music videos of a video entirely made up of toys. By the toys and lights appearing to come alive and turn on by themselves creates an interesting scene and gives a sense of magic, this will engage our audience as our target audience are mainly the younger generation providing a feeling of youth. We have also tried to make some interesting cuts for example, zooming into a toy which then blurs and from that zooming out to see an untuned T.V. By creating interesting cuts and angles we are making our music video look much more exciting and creative, therefore engaging our audience. We have also used fast-cut montage editing in our music video, this is a common convention of most music videos and we have used this to make the images appear so quickly that the decoder wants to watch it again so they understand the whole meaning.

Ambiguity:

There is much ambiguity in the song, after researching peoples interpretations of the meaning of the song, I found a lot of different viewpoints, from someone thinking the song meant the low points in a relationship and another saying that it was about playing pretend when you are a kid. Due to vast interpretations of this song, it gave us an opportunity to be really creative and to not stick to conventional guidelines of a story. After going through the lyrics we found that they were extremely childlike and innocent, which is matched by the upbeat and simplistic sound to the music, childlike innocence in our video. We then decided to show toys coming to life, representing the innocent and childlike lyrics. We found this appropriate as we interpreted the lyrics as reminiscing on memories as a child. I took the lyrics ‘in a cold, hot air balloon’ as looking over his memories as a child, and cold meaning that the memories are just memories. I think that people will get lots of different meanings from the lyrics and our interpretation which I feel makes for a more interesting video as it isn’t a coherent meaning which makes it more interesting to watch.

Intertextuality:

When I started to think of Intertextuality within our music video I was kind of stumped as I couldn’t think of anything that we made reference to, however when I started to think about it more I felt that our music video provided the same sort of scenario as Disney’s ‘Toy Story’, about toys that come alive when no one is around. We were also influenced by children’s story books that create the impression that the children’s toy’s come alive when they leave the room.