Research Task =]

I have chosen the music genre which is made apparent through the key concepts. The genre of the music video is love, which can be seen through the choice of shots, locations, character, facial expressions and the actual song.
I have chosen Taylor Swifts video ‘Love story’ which portrays the classic story of Romeo and Juliet. The narrative works by mixing a modern day high school scene with the olden day Castle where supposed Juliet (Taylor) lives, at the high school two students first meet (love at first sight) Taylor and boy, which then cuts to her being Juliet and meeting Romeo at the royal dance, not knowing who he is till after, creating the concept of forbidden love, and that they are both young. Obviously the song ends with her last verse stating that Romeo asks to marry her,
yet then Taylor comes back from her fairy-tale ending back in high school where she starts talking to the boy that she has just met, it shows the love can be seen as a fairy tale and most girls can relate to these situations when they are young and fall in love for the first time. The ideology shows the story of Romeo and Juliet, every relationships has its ups and downs. People fall in love and someone is always against it or they supposedly live happily ever after in the end.
The main target audience for Taylor Swift would be teenagers to young adults, predominantly female. This is because most of her songs are based upon adolescent memories and previous boyfriend relationships. Representation is used in the video through the characters and location. The song is called ‘Love Story’ therefore the audience would realize before even watching the video that a love story would be represented in the video. In this aspect the video shows the representation of a stereotypical High School scene
  
with a young adolescent boy and girl, it then stereotypes the traditional setting of romantic scenes of a castle and forestry with the use of Shakespearean dresses and menswear this shows a typical young girl fantasy of love. The use of the Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet is what teenagers would study at school and a play that is well-known to most. It uses the connotations of betrayal, forbidden romance and rebellion, which can still be seen in schools today on a much smaller scale. The old castle is a beautiful romantic location to set a love story, and many can relate to this fantasy and its every young girls dream to live happily ever after.

The video has a linear narrative, with an intertextual reference to Shakespeare. The beginning of the song has them meet at a party in the first verse. The second verse where she has snuck out to the garden to see him “We keep quiet ’cause we’re dead if they knew” seems to imply that something is going on. In the very next bridge she refers to herself as a scarlet letter, which could easily imply that she’s pregnant. When they finally meet on the outskirts of town and he tells her that he has spoken to her father, and he has apparently consented to the marriage. One good reason for this quick turnaround may be to save the shame of a baby out of wedlock. If this is the case though, there is a very ironic suggestion to “pick out a white dress,” though this could be intentional to keep up her image of virginity. This has the potential to be a very ironic representation of a girl’s infatuation with a guy, which leads to an unfortunate marriage of necessity. Also it is perhaps a satire of how people always seem to believe that their own romances are worthy of Romeo and Juliet (which we all know does not end that well) and are always blinded by their position within their own relationships. At the end the song returns to present day where she goes and talks to the guy for the first time, showing the audience that this could be the beginning of the fantasy she has just imagined in her head. The Shakespearean references could be used to over dramatize the narrative, and as we all know they die in the end, instead of living happily ever after. However the ‘scarlet letter’ reference could also show her desirability but that she is off limits as seen in the video at the grand ball.
This is the foundation of Swift’s lyric–that any ‘love story’ is rife with complications, peaks and valleys, extreme joy and unbearable heartache. And by comparing the song’s characters to Shakespeare’s, she’s simply alluding to the idea that all love stories are fundamentally the same, regardless of their origin or outcome. There is a relationship between lyrics, visual and the music. There is also lots of close ups of the artist as she is the main character in the video. The institution of a music video would be the record label, company as they have the main role of making the music video promoting the artist to their audience and fan base. The video helps market the artist and wants to create the most profit, as videos can cost an extortionate amount of money. “Love Story” was first released as the debut single off Swift’s second album, Fearless, in 2008. In an article for Billboard, Swift described “Love Story” as “a love that you’ve got to hide because for whatever reason it wouldn’t go over well. I spun it in the direction of Romeo and Juliet; our parents are fighting. I relate to it more as a love that you cannot really elaborate on — a love that maybe society wouldn’t accept or maybe your friends wouldn’t accept.”

The language used in the video is modern day love lyrics except for the use of ‘Scarlet Letter’ in the lyrics, the narrator alludes to Romeo and Juliet and The Scarlet Letter to describe a lover whom her father will not let her see. In the end, however, the father reconciles and the lover proposes to the female narrator. The proposal is accompanied by a key change.

The camera is constantly moving to show that the narrative is always moving on to something new. It keeps the audience entertained with a quicker paceas the audience become more excited of how the characters relationships evolve throughout the video. The camera angles change as they like to show different perspectives of the narative. They use closeups of Taylor and the Boys faces, to see their emotion by making it vey intimate to eachother and for the audience to be involved with that intimacy. There are also tracking and establishing shots of places and people. And this is a birdseye view of the dancing to make vary the shots to make them more interesting and enjoyable for the audience. The music directly correlates at time with the footage. As the song progresses the editing gets quicker as the shots cut from her on the balcony, to a close up of them holding hands, to the forest back to the balcony.

Here Taylor is in the forest as she has seceretly come to find Romeo. The camera likes to zoom into the action and focus in on Taylors facial expressions. It brings in the songs lyrics ‘we’d be dead if they knew’ showing how they cant be seen together so the mise-en-scene of the forest, night time and the lantern emphasises the secret love they share.
A white horse is shown in the video obviously the one the man rode to see her on, the use of an animal shows the gentleness and romantic nature of the video. The shots are repetative but put into different orders. When she is on the balcony she engages with the audience by looking directly into the camera as if she is telling you this stoy of her love personally just to you.
This shot is just after she has seen him running to her balcony, she smiles and then there is a typical dramatic almost slow motion running scene, where they run to eachother and have a full on romantic kiss scene.
I like this image as it shows the secretness of their relationship and that the audience is involved in this secret. It uses iconogaphy of being quiet by putting a finger to his lips. So that nobody hear them, and setting their meeting in the dead of night shows the exciting and typical routine of secret meetings. This single part of the video links eveything together by showing the fairytale she dreams of and the love she has for him.

This is the final shot, where she comes back to reality, where in her fantasy she thinks he asks her to marry her, to her real life where this guy actually comes up to talk to her instead, the scene then goes to a black out as the music fades.