Challenging Conventions

Typical conventions of music videos are broken occasionally, making them more unique and challenging audience expectations.

Examples of successful music videos that have broken conventions include:

Welcome To Heartbreak – Kanye West Ft. Kid Cudi (Directed by Nabil)
Editing plays a large part in this video (Editor: Ryan Bartley) and contributes most to its originality. The editing even made people think that something was wrong with their computer, as many people made comments on several websites.

Praise You – Fatboy Slim (Directed by Spike Jonze)

This music video uses a memorable home video clip where Spike Jonze (an American director of music videos and commercials) appears as Richard Koufey, the choreographer for the fictional Torrence Community Dance group. Hoping to incite controversy, Jonze & Co. put on a show before a line of people about to enter a movie theatre. The theatre’s manager greets the performance with unscripted rage, angrily turning off the boombox which blares Fatboy's anthem. Spike showed the video to Slim who loved it and the resulting clip was a huge success, and 'Koufey' and his troupe were invited to New York City to perform the song for the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards. The video received awards for Best Direction, Breakthrough, and Best Choreography.

Teardrop – Massive Attack (Directed by Walter Stern)

Massive Attack's ‘Teardrop’ uses an unusual, yet simple video clip. The soundtrack provides the heartbeat of a lip-synching foetus in uterus. The unborn child responds subtly to light and sound, patiently waiting for the moment it will emerge from the womb, perhaps as soon as the song ends. Here, the use of sfx and editing is solely relied on for the video to produce its simplistic style, but the absence of artists or real people challenged conventions, especially in 1998.

Challenging the conventions of music videos makes them stand out from the rest and creates interest in viewers. This is one of the main aims of the videos as it is essential that producers and directors make them as unique and original as possible to make audiences want to watch them repeatedly and therefore maximise the music video's ability to be used as a promotional tool for the song and artist.