We conducted a questionnaire that we sent to people (all 17-18 year olds) to learn more about what people liked in music videos.
These are the responses we got to the questions:
What genre of music do you listen to?
List some of your favourite music videos.
What do you like about these videos?
After hearing the pitch of our music video, what score out of 10 would you give our idea?
What features would you like to see in our music video?
We also recorded responses from a few other people.
After seeing these responses I found that most people like a storyline, but also that sometimes it's important to make the music the focus as well, especially in pop where a lot of videos have a narrative and its important not to overpower the song.
Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" includes features that we would want to use in our video, like the elements of 'bubblegum pop'. These are usually the bright colours, mainstream outfits and 'girl-meets-boy' narratives.
The video was directed by Ben Knetchel, and he has made sure to keep the cute crush feel of the song that makes the video so typically pop.
The video is edited so that the visuals link with the lyrics a lot of the time, for instance when she says "Ripped jeans, skin was showing" and he takes off his shirt. This amplifies the lyrics and lets the viewer feel the way that she feels with this crush.
There's also a relationship between the music and the visuals. The editing is mostly on the beat, and while she sings the camera occasionally cuts away to the band behind her to show the guitarists, the drummer and the two guys on the keyboard - mostly during the chorus when the music is most noticeable because of all the instruments that come together. There is a section at the end where the music changes pace and you can only here the violin playing, and the visuals show her in a dream. This matches and emphasises the way that the music is stripped down during that verse.
The record company are trying to sell this song by making Carly Rae Jepsen relatable to their target audience (who would probably be young 12-17 year old girls. She is singing about meeting someone for the first time and instantly crushing on them, and loads of teenage girls will hear the song and like it because its catchy and understandable.
This video looks like it was produced with a bigger budget than the three videos she had before it. The camera quality looks better and her image changed slightly. The clothes are still mainstream but they are put together nicer than in her previous videos where she just wears dresses or plain t-shirts with jeans.
A lot of the time in pop videos, especially with female artists, they are on display for the purpose of the male gaze, and I think she is to an extent, like when she is washing the car in shorts and a vest, but she isn't the focus of 'the gaze'. The guy that she is watching wears a vest as well and his arm muscles are on display while he fixes the car. Even in the first scene, he mows the lawn and takes off his shirt while she watches through a window, and the camera pans up his torso to exhibit his body. The window is a reference to 'looking' and being watched, and is also a reference to the commonly used narrative of the young gardener and the older woman who sexually objectifies him in TV shows like 'Desperate Housewives'. I like this because the roles are reversed and the man is objectified instead.
I think this video is equally weighted between performance based and narrative based, because although a lot of the music video tells the story of the narrative, there are still shots of her singing in the garage with her band, and she even sings during the narrative shots.
