UK Music Video Rules

• Casual clothes
• Flash-backs
• Lip syncing
• Pointing to viewers
• Montage editing
• Close up to show emotion
• Sunglasses
• Establishing shots
• Ma. 3 costume changes

UK Grime Moodboard

When creating my mood-board for UK Grime I gathered a background picture of a run down estate because that’s a stereotypical setting for UK video. On top of the estate I have pictures of well known Grime artists such as Professor Green, Chipmunk, Wiley, N-Dubz, Roll Deep + Tinchy Stryder. Also on my mood-board I put the little ‘Parental Advisory’ sign because a lot of the songs these artists make have inappropriate words in them.

UK Grime is not very commercial within the UK because the lyrics use a lot of slang words that an older generation wouldn’t understand so songs don’t tend to be air-played or make the UK Top 40.

The artists tend to be on the own in videos unless it’s a collaboration and the videos don’t have a lot of narrative, there more performance and on the own singing directly to the camera, with many of the shots mid-shot or closer and focusing on the artist lip-syncing.

Another thing that tends to happen in UK Grime videos is that either in the lyrics or through the video they promote something that is close to them/making them money. For example Tinchy Stryder promotes his own clothing range ‘Star in the Hood’ by wearing the clothes in all of his videos. Another example is in N-Dubz’s song ‘Papa” they talk about their new album coming out a few weeks after the single is released.

Albums don’t really get sold by UK Grime artists because they wont sell much copies, so they tend to go commercial to sell and produce albums like Chipmunk and N-Dubz. So the analysis a album cover for Grime artists would be hard, it usually tends to be just a picture of them and the album name.

The colours in a UK Grime video are very dark and sinister. All these ‘artists’ came from run-down areas and are now making it out of the ‘slums’ so there sticking to the root and letting everybody know where they came from, and the show that in videos by glumness and not very bright poppy colours.

However the negative side of UK Grime is that it is a little bit repetitive in everything that it does. All the artists market themselves in the same way with a ‘bad-boy’ image and all the lyrics are the same such as they talk about drugs, guns and that or growing up in a run-down area and now making it as a star. Also they tend to be in the same locations as each other, either on a run-down estate (background on mood-board) or within a club-scene so there promoting there song that it’ll make a big song for them to play to a lot of people.

Vernallis & Goodwin Theories

In Devlin’s new UK Pop/Grime video ‘Runaway’ you can see that the people who directed that video applied Carol Vernallis theory of MTV style editing to a pop video.

Many times in this very good video there’s frequent quick cuts between different types of shots, angles and scenarios that involved Devlin himself or the guest singer Yasmin. Also within the video you can see that there is disjuncture because as well as the video cutting off beat between the narrative and performance he also sings the lyrics off beat as well to match it sometimes.

Also like many music videos these days the editing of it is much much different compared to a film’s editing. The editing doesn’t flow it just jumps between different things that are happening in the video. Finally the last way you can apply the Carol Vernallis theory to Devlin’s Runaway video is that no one element (music, image, narrative) ever gains the upper hand it always combining two or three at a time, and keeping us equally focused on the video/lyrics, lyrics/image or another certain combination.

However Andrew Goodwin’s theory is that ‘pop’ videos can be categorized into 3 different types, these types are:
Illustration – Music cuts on beat + image represents the lyrics
Amplification – Music cuts on and off beat + maybe a narrative; image amplify lyrics
Disjuncture – music cuts off beat, unrelated images in video – this is usually done by well-known artists/bands.

In this video by the UK band N-Dubz you can clearly see that you can apply Andrew Goodwin’s theory and the specific part of a ‘Illustration’ video. This Is because through-out the whole video of their new song the music cuts on the beat and the whole video matches what there talking about in the lyrics and that you ca rule out ‘Disjuncture’ because the images relate. They are also dressed how there supposed to so they’ll fit in the genre and acting how people from the same industry do in their videos (flash clothes, boats, houses; all glitz + glamour).

Album Cover Analysis

2 UK Music Videos

For our music video were chosen the UK Music genre of pop/grime and our chosen song is Example - Millionaires. So before we start planning and thinking our ideas for our music video, these are the common conventions of UK Music videos. The two music videos i looked at were Tinchy Stryder Ft. Taio Cruz - Take Me Back & Chipmunk - Oopsy Daisy.

- Not a lot of narrative
- Most of video you can see them lip syncing
- Spend majority of video on there own
- Promoting themselves/product
- Sunglasses
- 3/4 costume changes
- Montage editing
- 'Pricey' things to show their money/fame
- Cuts on the beat of the song