Friday 27 September 2013

Music Video Redundancy/Entropy

Redundant messages are those which convey predictable or conventional ideas. Usually we would associate the word with that which is boring but Redundancy is not a bad thing. It is vital in day to day situations for communication and understanding.

Entropy is that which is unpredictable; essentially, it's the opposite of redundancy.

Levels of entropy and redundancy differ when it comes to different genres.

Taylor Swift


Taylor Swift tends to come across as fairly reduntant. Her image is very typical in a lot of her videos resulting in a mis-en-scene of one 'fresh-out-of-the-box, fashionable adolescent'. Although some of the things seen in these videos are a little unusual (eating birthday cake by yourself, people dressed as animals dancing around etc.) they are not given enough attention/camera time to become of any specific relevance or present themselves as motifs.
There is soft lighting admist fairly high exposure giving an 'Instagram-esque' feel that will be positively redundant to Taylor Swift's hipster/mainstream audiences. Theses familiarisations are made to create a level of redundancy for easy communication of relate-ability. The only real levels of entropy come through the cinematograpghy although this only seems to break from convention in the second video with the execution of one near completely continuous shot. However, this less conventional level of cinemaotgraphy is not seen in the rest of Taylor's videos.

Yo La Tengo


Yo La Tengo are a completely different story altogether. They prefer to create entropy through completely or near completely disjunctive videos. 'Sugarcube', focuses largely on the narrative, seeming more like a clip from a poorly produced movie than a music video, due to the over layering of sound: speech, diegetic noises.
'I'll Be Around' seems to then stretch the boundaries of disjunction by layering another mis-en-scene of text which has no relation to the lyrics and only relates to the video in the second half, leaving it disjunctive until that point.

 OK Go

In OK Go's case, the levels of entropy they choose to convey come across far easier than can be said for Yo La Tengo. Their videos are also disjunctive in majority but do at times contain hinted amplifying features.
All 3 examples here consist of one continuous shot, which is not cinematographic format we are used to.

I think that it would be far more engaging for myself and more importantly the audience if I go for a more entropic format.

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