#8 Linear Narrative – The Journey of Something/Someone

A narrative is the way that a story is told and in which order it is shown. A linear narrative is when a video tells a story in a chronological order. A plot to a video is very important, it controls what events happen in a story and without a strong linear plot a music video could turn out unintentionally confusing. The theory of the linear narrative belongs to Todorov, in films he believed that there are five stages in the narrative however, in music videos he believed there were only three.

http://www.slideshare.net/samuelhudson/how-narrative-is-used-in-music-videos

The Chemical Brother ft The Flaming Lips – The Golden Path:

Chris Milk directed the video for the bands in 2003. It involves a very complex plot that follows the hallucinogenic experience of a depressed and bored office worker. The video is about expressing the feelings that get bottled up because of the mundane routine of work. We watch as the man (Fran Kranz) starts off his day so unhappy that he barely checks for cars before crossing a road. Even though there is only 59seconds until his first ‘vision’ Chris manages to create a real sense of slowing passing time, you can really feel the day dragging before it has even began.  We watch as he escapes for little pockets of time from his work to what we can only presume are fantasies, seeing that on his return to reality he acts less supressed and starts to break free from his return. The video continues along these lines until the end, when he disappears into his shirt and seems to have been freed into this new ‘hippy’ lifestyle of his.

Gnarles Barkley – Who’s Gonna Save My Soul:

This music video is also directed by Chris Milk, which is actually noticeable, not because it shows similar style (because I don’t think it does) but because they videos by Chris are out of the ordinary and have very strong story lines.  This video consists of a woman dumping her boyfriend, he then goes on to rip out his heart and hand it to her on a plate, the heart then grows legs, arms, a moth and starts singing into a broccoli at the climax of the song. I think that this is a slightly disgusting but awesome video that works brilliantly as a film but I don’t think it works at all as a music video. Seeing as the point of music videos (apart to just make money) are to advertise the bands and their music then this video just doesn’t cut it. Because of the elaborate storyline and scripts, the song itself just fits in as a backing track, being mostly ignored. However, it is very true that because of the severity of the video people would be pushed into talking about it with their friends and publicising it on social network sights such as Facebook, this may lead to a slight increase in interest in the band, but more than likely it will be passed off as ‘the heart song’ or something similar rather than people saying ‘have you heard Gnarls Barkley’s new track?’ .All the above aside, it is very common for bands have extreme or shocking videos in order to capture the public’s attention, the more that they get talked about and spread out among friends, the more publicity the band and video will get,  this process is called viral advertising. Now back to this video, Chris must have done a pretty good job on it as it managed to get several achievements. These include: a rating as a ‘Must See’ from the Entertainment Weekly. A rating as a ‘Hot Video’ from the Rolling Stone magazine.  A nomination for a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video, and last of all, a win of the Yellow Pencil Award for Music Video Animation.

Info obtained from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who's_Gonna_Save_My_Soul 

Stereophonics - Innocent:
This is one of my all time favourite tracks with an awesome video. I no that it's not a perfect example as it features the band performing, but it does have a side story that tells the visual of the lyrics.