The song 'Love How It Hurts' by the British artist Scouting For Girls has many of the conventions of the type of indie pop music video that our group will try to emulate. Below are some of the features of this video.
Institution & Audience
This video has been made by a large commercial label, Epic, and has been created to accompany a mainstream song by a mainstream artist, Scouting For Girls. This means that the video is likely to get a large amount of airtime on video channels, where it will recieve more ambient viewing, as music video channels often get. However, the Youtube video is owned by the large music video website company Vevo, where it will recieve many more focused viewings - currently standing at over 880,000 views.
In terms of institutional context, the record label are a large music record company owned by Sony Music, a media conglomerate. The artist will have large promotion through their record label, who probably have a large amount of influence in the group's style and choice of music video.
Genre & Narrative
This video is an example of amplification of the song, because there are direct links between the sound and the visuals. For instance, the lyrics "I'll let you break it again and again" are linked to the image of a boy pulling apart a tape. Under Barthes theory of narrative codes, this video uses the cultural code to signify the juxtaposition between the two male characters. The boy with large glasses and bright clothes is suggested to be less cool than the boy with slicked hair wearing denim, although we only know this because of the culture we live in.
The boy in the first image (above, left) we know to be less 'cool' than in the second image (above, right) due to our cultural code.
This video is also inherently commercial, and is not likely to be considered art. The video shows the story of a basic setup - a boy infatuated by a young girl, who likes somebody else. There is humour used throughout the video, with the characters all being extreme stereotypes of the character that they are representing, although it allows the audience to sympathise with the boy who is less cool, and seen as the underdog in the video. The music video feels almost like a short film, with no performance shots - just the characters who are played by actors, not band members.
Media Language
It does not seem that this video has been used simply as a marketing tool like many other videos. As the band do not feature, there are no 'meat shots' of the artist, so the video works more as an illustration of the song. However, the song does have a sense of authenticity, as the video feels semi-biographical, showing the type of people the band see themselves to be. So a meta-narrative is constructed, that Scouting For Girls feel that they are underdogs, and not the confident children that they grew up with.
Various techniques have been used to tell this story and construct the characters in this way. For instance, when the boy eats his lunch, a wide long-shot is used to convey his loneliness and the fact that he has no friends. In contrast, nearly all of the shots of the girl have at least one other person in them, which connotes that she is popular and being 'chased' by the young boys.
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