Katy Perry - Part Of Me
This music video had caught my eye as it goes against Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze and empowers women, as we see in the narrative aspect of the music video we see Katy Perry getting cheated on, and she was feeling weak, as you would stereotypically think, until she joins the marines and trains with/harder than the men, this is a good conversational point and this would build word of mouth promotion along with "re-watchability". If we relate this music video to the representation theory of Stuart Hall, the readings we could get are that she is stronger and is getting over the break up, but the oppositional reading would be that it is propaganda to try and get members of the general public to join the marines. Katy Perry may have targeted this at teenage girls, to show that if something goes wrong in a relationship - be strong and soldier through it.
Ludacris - Act A Fool
I like this music video as it has intertextuality with the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious, this means that they could reach out to a wider audience, such as the fans of Fast and Furious, Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson, Paul Walker, Eva Mendes and Devon Aoki, and this would help with the promotion of the song and also the movie.
The narrative element of the music video has similar scenes to the movie, as at the start the cars pull up and each driver collects a package, and in the movie Brian and Roman drive to a impound lot and collect a package, this is a unique technique as it doesn't reveal scenes from the movie but replicates them.
The costume for the music video is branded clothing such as Adidas and Nike, for example when Ludacris says "Just bought me and my cars some brand new shoes" - he shows a pair of Nike air force 1's and these are iconic in a rap video, as these are the trainers that most rappers used to/still wear. The style is conventional of a hip-hop music video as we have lots of good looking girls, fast cars and have a lot of attitude from the artist - hand gestures and body language.
This music video had inspired me as the attitude shown by the actors/artist in the video added verisimilitude to the video, and made it more conventional to the genre, and this will help me as it creates the image of how I would like my music video to look like and how to make it conventional to the genre.
Gabrielle Aplin - The Power of Love
I had first heard this song on the John Lewis advert, and had then seen the music video from there, The colour pallet is very dark/pastel colours to connote simplicity and create dark atmosphere to connote vulnerability, as she is playing piano in a empty house, and we see a long shot through a door, as if someone is watching her. The style of this music video shows love from a darker perspective and it protects us, on top of the piano we see dead flowers, this makes the video seem darker and more emotional. This video is inspirational as it has given me an idea of how I could use the colour pallet to my advantage to alter and manipulate the tone/mood of the video.
Naughty Boy - La La La ft. Sam Smith
This music video has a lot of conflict about the meaning of the video, at first glance we would think that it is pastiche of The Wizard of Oz, but some believe it to be an interpretation of a Bolivian legend, I think that the director of the video has been clever and connoted two different meanings to the viewers, reaching out to different audiences. I like how the theme of domestic violence is tackled in this video, and how to overcome it, this would support people who have suffered similarly and give them confidence to stay positive. The narrative aspect of this video is what interested me, as it was successful as visuals matched the lyrics and also was cutting to the beat, creating a positive atmosphere.
This week we had looked at our Thrift Shop "Mash-Up" video that we had created at the end of AS. We had looked at how vast the impact of picking the correct actors and planning the shot types the had on the messages and readings of the music video, as had also had an knock-on effect of the quality of the composition. The idea behind the mash-up video was to look at a range of music video styles. The style that I had was in any style other than that of the song, so we had decided to use a Rock style having the actor dressed in black, leather with sunglasses singing into a microphone, with superimposed images of thrift shops behind him, the weaknesses of the piece were that lip syncing was very, very difficult as the choice of actors had a big impact on this, as the actor must look like the have "Grain of voice" to match the vocals of the song, But a positive outcome of the mash up video was that I learnt how to use the green screen and what not to do with it, I had learnt that we should keep the lighting consistent so that it is easier to remove the background from the visuals, as we had used natural lighting so when I was removing the background in areas the image was "fuzzy". 
