Carol Vernallis - Music video Theory

Carol Vernallis is  music video theorist who specialises in interpreting the roles that editing, narrative, meaning and continuity play in a music video. She also specialises in the way that sound is project through a music video to make it look like the sound is diegetic to keep the continuity running and how thinks are done such as editing with transitions and camera shots to keep a piece of text continuous. Carol Vernallis' theory goes into more detial about the key aspects that she finds important, shown below.

Editing Continuity:-
Edits are created and certain camera shots are used to show importance of a certain scene that is taking place in-front of the audience such as a close up of a gun and a shot then the person lying on the ground to show the audience that they have been shot.

Edits:-
Allowed to be used and not pointless due their special effects used such as a fading out for example.

Jump Cuts:-
These are used to speed certain things up, to keep the story moving. The use of jump cuts is often very frequent because a lot is needed for a music video and the audience will get bored of seeing the same scene over and over again.

Camera:-
The camera is used in synchronization with the music so as that it all has a certain rhythm and that nothing looks out of place .

Editing
 is often shown "Cutting to the Beat" this is to keep it intact with the music so as that nothing looks out of place, the phrase is used and shows certain glimpses of the music video and what's going to be in it without revealing the full story in it such as a story about love and showing hand holding to not give anything revealing away. Camera movements are sometimes done to show the illusion of an edit, an example of this is panning the room to a number of people at a party moving from place to place continuously to show the continuity of music video and to also set the scene.

The Fourth Wall
The fourth wall is a fairly modernist term as it says that there are boundaries within a piece of text that should not be broken, the best example of a modernist text where the fourth wall remains intact is FRIENDS. Friends especially the scenes in Monica's apartment very rarely showed the "Fourth Wall" the camera shots often set the scene but we never see the other side of the camera mainly because it shouldn't be any different when it matter of fact the fourth wall is the TV set where the camera are filming from.

Framing

Carol Vernallis states that one of the key and most important camera shots used within a music video is the establishing shot, this is because it makes a music video seem more distinctive and also sets the scene for us to having something to relate it to such as Seeing a skyline with a certain light and recognising the time of day. This can be shown in the music video for The Fray- You found me as they constantly use Establishing shots to set the scenes they use it at least 3-4 times within the music video.