fifteen by taylor swift

The music video I am analysing is ‘Fifteen’ by Taylor Swift . The video was directed by Roman White. The song was released on September 1,

2009 by Big Machine Records.

The genre for the song is county/pop. The typical conventions for country/pop music videos are;

bright colours, close ups and extreme close ups, costume changes, dance sequences, lip synching

and there is usually a lack of instruments.

‘Fifteen’ is uncommon to pop video's as it breaks and challenges the traditional conventions of a pop video. It

does this by using Taylor’s star image (instrument playing) as an advantage.

This is a narrative based video with elements of performance.

‘Fifteen’ meets the common pop conventions by having a relationship between the lyrics and visuals. Throughout the song there are many examples. The first example is when Taylor sings ‘you walk through the doors’ and on screen Taylor walks through the door. Another example

of this is ‘You sit in class next to a redhead named Abigail’ when this is sang, a redhead girl appears on

screen. One more example of this is when the word ‘night’ is

sang, on screen, night appears.

Like usual pop videos, ‘Fifteen’ uses extreme close ups and close ups of the artist. The extreme close ups of Taylor

singing are used in this video to engage the target audience as if she is singing to them personally. Extreme close ups are also used to show Taylor playing her guitar, this is to allow her audience to see that she is a talented musician, whilst again linking with her star image. An establishing shot is

used at the start of the video to create the setting for song.

‘Fifteen’ is very similar to the style of video commonly used by Taylor, by which, the clothes she wears, the performance

based shots, and her appearance are traditional to her niche. This creates Taylor’s star image to help her sell her

albums. Her hair is again in blonde curls.

When the song starts Taylor uses notion of looking to flashback to when she was 15. She does this by looking at

and old photo of her and her best friend.

The song then flashes back to the real world at the end and shows Taylor standing in the rain at her old school. The

camera focuses on a girl in the school playground to show Taylor singing to the girl because she doesn’t want her to

make the same mistakes as she did when she was 15 herself and asif she is speaking from past experience.

The song is split into two halves. The first half uses the pop conventions of being bright and happy with

the sun out, whereas the second half of the song uses dark colours, pathetic fallacies and the rain is

pouring. This again matches lyrics to visuals, as the first half is the song is happy and the second half is

sad. The video cleverly uses the weather and colours to address this.

The second half of the song is unhappy and sad. This is shown through a variety of ways. A pathetic fallacy

illustrates this as when the girls are upset the weather is raining and the sky is dark just asif it is in sympathy with her. And at the end of the song Taylor

is dressed in black. Black is a colour which symbolises sadness.