By Charlie Pugh

MUSIC VIDEO AND REDUNDANCY/ENTROPY

INTRODUCTION• The messages that music videos can provide depends on how the audience reacts and

behaves during the duration. As a result many may discover that the degree of acceptance of the visuals depends on how easy or hard it is for the viewer to translate the visuals into understandable meanings or morality.

• There are two main communication methods that are used to try to connect with the audience, which are as follows…

• Redundancy is the repetition and re-enforcement of known information, which in other words means that the visuals are highly predictable but lack Originality and can get boring to some more imaginative viewers.

• Entropy is a source of information that cannot be related to the existing contextual information which allows the artist to expand his creativity by adding surreal visuals to his/her music video.

• In this presentation, I am going to be analysing both the redundant and entropic elements of a music video of my choice which is “Guns.N Roses- Sweet Child of Mine”

REDUNDANCY ELEMENTS• The "Sweet Child O' Mine" video depicts the band rehearsing in the Huntington Ballroom

at Huntington Beach, surrounded by crew members.

• Redundancy doesn’t play a very large role in this video, as most of the content is very surreal which I’ll explain in more detail about in the next slide. Anyways one of the few redundant shots in this is a scene at the beginning which depicts a crew designing a set for the artists to sing before the music actually starts which gives the audience the feel of a loud working environment.

• Another thing to take note of is that the entire music video is shot inside the studio which limits the artists creativity to give the audience a strong visual experience themselves ad having to rely on the editing crew to make the video surreal

ENTROPY ELEMENTS• Throughout the entire music video, the visuals constantly switches from colour to black

and white and back again, which gives us an old-world feeling. Also during some of the black and white footage the crew are still seen setting up the scene which is quite rare in other music video’s which usually show just the artists and the locations they go to.

• The editing is very fast paced, switching between black and white to colour in usually the span of 2 seconds which raises the intensity of the beat and is designed to get the audience up and dancing along.

• Despite the fact that this song is mainly about lead singer Axl Rose proclaiming his love for his girlfriend at the time, Erin Everly, there are no romantic scenes in the video whatsoever and a girl only appears for 1 second during the black and white scenes which allows the audience the creativity to interpit the romantic visuals and meanings for themselves.

THANKS FOR WATCHING!