What is a music video - Miss miller

A music video has many purposes such as: to promote an artist or their song, represent the artist through a short narrative, attract a particular target audience, identify an artist or group, buy into the artist's lifestyle, show the different generic conventions of a genre, to make the audience remember the song and video, to make a song available tot a wide audience, show more about the artist, to satisfy the audience who request music videos, to build a relationship with the artist or to allow the audience to understand more about a song.

Music videos are split into 3 categories:
- Performance; which consists of the artist being filmed whilst singing and dancing.
- Narrative; which is when the music video tells the audience a story.
- Concept; which sells the audience and idea or a theme.

One Direction - You & I Music Video

The purpose of this music video is to identify the group, they all sing to the camera very close which shows clearly the five members of one Direction allowing the audience to identify them. The style of this music video is a performance, the boys are singing to the camera and the whole video consists of footage of the boys singing to the camera and walking towards the camera. This particular genre of music is pop, which is why it is conventional that the music video is a performance style video as many pop videos consist of the artist performing to the camera for a certain purpose. This could be either to; to identify the artist, learn more about the artist or to create a relationship between the artist and the audience. This particular video by One Direction has the purpose of identifying the group to the audience and performing to them which is why the video shows the boys singing to the camera.

The cinematography used in this one Direction pop video contains many close-ups of the five artists, this promotes the artist and allows the audience to see their emotions whilst singing the song, this allows the audience to create a relationship with the audience and make the music video more enjoyable. Also a long shot is used to show the five boys walking together, this portrays them as united and together and similar people, this allows the audience to gain an insight to what the boys are like and how they dress, making the audience feel like they know the band members and want to continue being their fans and listening to their music, this also increases the publicity for One Direction. Also the use of the boys walking towards the camera adds the performance factor to the video, this proves that the video is a performance style one, appealing to the target audience who like the members of the band, such as teenage girls mostly.

The mise-en-scene element of costumes in this video includes the boys wearing dull coloured clothing, this is used to create a simplistic look, the use of the colours black white and grey are all very simple. This brings One Direction to the same level as their audience as they are wearing ordinary clothes and acting like ordinary people and not stars, this allows the audience to create a relationship with the artists, this subverts from the pop music genre as pop artists stereotypically act flamboyant in their music videos. This subverting of the pop music genre makes One Directions video for 'you and I' stand out and appeal more to the target audience as it is different from most of the other videos belonging to the pop music genre. 

This music video particularly appeals the the pop genres target audience of young teenage girls as it shows the five boys (who most teenage girls love), in a different light, they are emotional about relationships whilst they sing compared to other videos they have released such as "Midnight memories" which is about partying and going out. This widens their target audience as they are not just seen as boys who go out and party, but boys who have relationships and care about people. This will appeal strongly to the target audience of teenage girls as they would love to see the five One Direction boys as loving and caring during their music videos. This again subverts the pop music genre as plenty of pop music videos include partying and dancing but in 'you and I' the boys are just walking and singing.

The editing used in this video is very slow paced and is edited to make it look like one long clip, this creates a realistic feel throughout the video which makes the artists seem generally emotional whilst singing about being in a relationship, this will appeal strongly to the audience as teenage girls stereotypically love to see boys who care, which is what the band are doing in this video. The use of slow paced editing matches the style of the music, slow, this makes the video look professionally made and makes it smoother to the audience, this will appeal more to them and increase the publicity for One Direction and their son 'You and I'.

The target audience for this video is teenage girls, this is why it contains no nudity or violence or sex scenes, it is clean and emotional which makes it relateable for teenage girls who are in relationships as they can relate to the lyrics being sung. This video strongly appeals to the teenage female target audience as the cinematography shows a lot of the boys who are attractive which makes the video appeal to the target audience.

Overall the video subverts the normal stereotypical elements of pop music videos due to the lack of excitement and flamboyant behaviour from the band, this makes the video stand out as it is different within the pop music genre and making it appeal more to their target audience.