Live To Narrative Performance Split

To help me understand what the average ratio of live performance to narrative performance is within indie music videos, I decided to analyse Lorde’s ‘Royals’. This will help me as she is the inspiration for our own artists and as the song we have chosen only has live performance, we can get guidance from this video instead.

The first ten seconds of the music video is ‘narrative performance’ with the camera showing an establishing shot of the location. This is key to the lyrics of the song (conforming to Goodwin’s theory that the visuals and lyrics have a connection). The is then followed by CGI, added in post-production, of a black screen with the words ‘LORDE Royals’. After this, the camera cuts, on the beat, to the ‘live performance’ of Lorde for two seconds however, lip syncing isn’t utilised. Instead Lorde is established by staring into the camera. It then cuts back to ‘narrative performance’, continuing to establish the location for three seconds. It is here when the camera cuts back to ‘live performance’ for three seconds.

This continues through the rest of the video. However, there is a trend. At the beginning of the video, the live performance is more even in ratio with the narrative performance. For example, for around the first minute, the split of narrative performance to live performance is 40:32 seconds. This allows the audience to become established with the location and characters as well as the artist.

However, in the middle of the song/music video, the narrative performance becomes much more frequent with the second minute of the narrative having a narrative to live performance split of 34:20 seconds. This is because as the song progresses, this is the moment where the narrative progresses at its greatest rate so the audience see more visuals to relate the story to the lyrics.

In the last minute, the narrative to live performance split changes again to 32:38 seconds. This is the only section of the music video where the amount of live performance exceeds the narrative performance. However, there is one consistent live performance clip within this section that extends over 27 seconds alone. In this moment there is a diminuendo, and the tempo slows down. Therefore, the artist is featured more in the live performance at this part as it is almost the rawest part of the song, allowing the opportunity for the audience to relate more to her. The visuals have been used to achieve this.

Overall in the music video there Is approximately a 116:85 second ratio of narrative to live performance. This tells me that the visuals are what drives the song in conjunction with the lyrics and audio (Goodwin’s theory).

How has this helped me?
As Lorde is the artist we have taken inspiration from, I now know that to conform to the codes and conventions of indie music videos, we should include more of the narrative performance within our music video that the live performance. However, I also realise that the split shouldn’t be consistent throughout the video eg. 4 seconds narrative intercut between every 4 seconds live performance. Instead, the split should be used to help create a deeper relationship with the audience and artist at certain points. This therefore creates a deeper meaning which is a code of the indie genre and the psychographics of our target audience we are trying to appeal to.