Ciara Video Analysis

• Music videos demonstrate certain genre characteristics - performeance of the song is not on stage but a studio performance. It is lip synced throughout and they are wearing appropriate clothes for the genre of the music 

• There is a relationship between lyrics and visual - the song is about Ciara acting 'like a boy' and this is seen throughout where she dresses like a boy (in a suit) and sits like a boy at the beginning of the music video. 

• There is a relationship between music and visual - on average there are two beats per shot and generally they change on the beat, but some of the shots change much more quickly and some slower. There are about 150 shots in the whole music video and a huge range of different camera movements including panning, zoom and tracking. 

• The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close-ups of the artist - this is evident in Ciara's "Like a Boy" as throughout the music video Ciara is seen in the majority of the shots which include long, mid and close-up shots. 

• The artist may develop motifs or iconography that recur across their work - in this music video, it is the objectification of males. This is seen when she grabs her crotch, she doesn't smile and the dance is more what you would expect from a male dancer. 

• There is frequent reference to the notion of 'looking' (screes within screes, filming, cameras) and particularly voyeuristic (pleasure through looking) treatment of the female body - this is opposite in Ciara's music video as she is seen to be objectifying the male rather than the female being objectified. We see him as passive with close-ups of her looking down on him. 

• There are often intertextual references-mostly to film, television and popular culture - usually women in this pop/ hip-hop genre are shown dancing provocatively where as Ciara has turned this round and her and her dancers are dancing like men. 

I decided to analyse Ciara's "Like A Boy" music video to help me with my music video as it is similar to it. I used Andrew Goodwin's 7 characteristics of a music video to help me analyse it in greater detail. This has helped me to see that in my own music video I would like to have dance shots with a plain background as I really liked that. Also from a practical point of view when they were filming the dance shots, the camera was always still but the shots were edited at a fast pace to still make it effective.