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).