Music Video Analysis- 'Who Run The World (Girls)' by Beyonce

Run The World (Girls)- Beyonce Music Video Analysis

I decided to analyse the music video, ’Run the World’ firstly because I like the song and the artist a lot and I think it’s message is very interesting. It was directed by Francis Lawrence who is an American music video and film director, he has also worked with stars among the likes of Jay-Z, Jennifer Lopez, Destiny’s Child, etc. The song heavily samples ‘Pon de Floor’ by Major Lazer following the same alternative hip-hop dance genres, however does incorporate the R’n’B sounds of Beyonce.

There is a strong relationship between the lyrics and visuals. The song is basically about female empowerment and Beyonce is trying to get across that without females the world would not be able to run. This feminist approach is clearly shown through the videos as the female to male ratio is about 20:1! She is here trying to highlight the fact that females dominate males. This is also shown through the females wearing very brightly coloured and royal looking clothing and the males who are seen later on in the video are wearing simple black attire. Also the use of the lion is clever, as the Lion is said to be the ‘king of the jungle’ so by placing it with the females accentuates the point that they are above all other humans.  One way I feel the lyrics contradict against the visuals is at the video opening where there are police clearly running to stop these women. I feel this contradicts with the message Beyonce is trying to get across. It sounds as if she wants to give the listeners the impression that females have a positive effect on society and have more of an impact than males, however by involving this scene of police running to them gives the impression that the females are simply being destructive and not helping or making progress at all. 

The relationship between music and visuals is also quite strong. For most of the video, the cuts change in time with the beats which makes the video seem very tight and planned. Another way this relationship is shown is through the change in the video when the pace changes. When the beat drops there is generally the group of females dancing in unison which highlights the lyric which is ‘Who run the world? Girls’, so these women all dancing together shows them uniting to stand up for female rights. While on the slower calmer parts of the song we are shown Beyonce standing alone singing, which helps us to concentrate more on the lyrics. Below is an example of Beyonce shown with the group of females, above an image of her singing alone.

For 95% of the music video Beyonce is shown on the screen, whether this being her alone or at the centre of a dance. The record company have clearly involved her in the music video so much to make sure the viewer know the song is by Beyonce and therefore feel more interested in buying it. This links into Dyer's star thoery which says a video should show a high percentage of the artist to be successful. of the Fans watching music videos want to see the artist they like, and the record companies are well aware of this. The image the audience is given of Beyonce is that she is a strong independent woman who can clearly look after herself, however she is lowering herself to the female celebrity stereotypes with her intimate scenes with men and skimpy outfits and in some ways making herself a sex object. She speaks of not needing a man in her life but is trying to attract men by flaunting herself, as you can see in the image below. The artist is definitely on sexual display and a lot of the other females in the video are doing the same moves as her so are also shown in this manner.

The video relates quite closely to other songs by the artist. Beyonce brings out a lot of tracks about female empowerment, for example; ‘Diva’, ‘Single Ladies’ and ‘Independent Women’, all of which include Beyonce showing how she can look after herself, and her videos generally include only females, however if there are males in the video, they are either rarely seen or shown to be less important than the females.

In terms of costume, some of the outfits do have sexual references like Beyonce’s dress with the material covering only what's necessary. Also there are other sexual references with the artist holding chains and being dressed in leather. These ideas have clearly been chosen just because the reason that sex sells, and the producers know that if they involve subtle sexual references into the videos it is going to go far. This is because sex is a taboo subject that people think should be kept private so bringing it out as small hints to the public is something people find quite exciting. 

In terms of what the music video is based around, the video is mostly performance based as it is mostly the artist singing the song to the audience. However there are both narrative and concept based elements within the video as there is a story told throughout of how these men are trying to catch the females but the females show them through dance and song that they are in control. The conceptual elements on the other hand are all to do with the mise-en-scene, with the costumes, make-up and the ways in which they linked to the music, for example the royal clothing worn by Beyonce highlights her authority over the male race. 

Final album cover

After I created the background, Freya got to work on finishing the album cover. She added the silhouette figures and played around with the text. Freya had to re-do the background, however, because it was the wrong size. Freya said it was hard to shrink the silhouettes to the right size as they come up really big and when you shrunk it it looked squashed so she had to lock the image first and then shrink it. We chose to stick to the conventions of Calvin Harris' single 'Feels So Close' by using Helvetica font. Although the text was in place and the silhouettes were in place, Freya was not happy with the text as she thought it looked dull so she added an outer glow to make the text stand out.

Freya Catmur-Hill's Evaluation - Question Four

Question 4 – How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning and construction and evaluation?

Over the duration of this project we used a lot of technological equipment. At the early stages of production when planning our work we look a lot on YouTube to get ideas of existing media products and look at the conventions of our products genre. We also looked at past blogs created by students on the same course as us. This gave us in insight onto what we could achieve doing. We also could use ideas that we saw. For example in our video on the phrase ‘Your love pours down on me surround me like a waterfall’ we saw in Beyoncé’s video a shot of water pouring onto her and we used this idea.

In the production stage of our video we used two different types of camera, with this we also had to use a tripod. For shooting most of our video we used a Sanyo HD camera which was fairly easy to use but also had a white balance feature which helped make all the colours look realistic. Using the tripod was good for shooting at angles and keeping the camera still but I found it hard to do for example dolly shots without the footage looking very unprofessional. At one point in our video we wanted to shoot balloons going up into the sky, when we thought of the idea we didn’t think about anything going wrong. When it came to shooting it, we realised that shooting the sky was very hard as the light wasn’t correct. We tried using a day setting on the camera and made sure we used the white balance feature but still could not get it right. In the end we has to wait until  the sun had gone down a bit so it wasn’t too bright .As we used stop-motion in our video we also used a Nikon D40 which had automatic or manual focus. Getting the focus on the camera got some getting used to as sometimes when it was on automatic, it didn’t have the right look to it. Especially on close ups it look a while to make sure we got the picture as clear as possible.

I personally had never edited on Apple’s Final Cut before so it was all a bit confusing to begin with. As Jessica in the group had, I watched her for the first bit then when I came to have a go I feel I picked it up very quickly. Cutting footage and moving it around was very simple. In our media video we used green screen which we wanted to put a solid colour behind. This we quite tricky as we had to move the controls around to get rid of as much of the green as we could without fading out or blurring the edges of what we wanted to keep in focus. After doing this had to make the colours behind with green otherwise they turned a horrible colour.

Taking pictures for our digipak and our advert we also again used green screen as we made silhouettes we also used a basic bounce light. We had to make sure the shadows weren’t going to ruin the picture and that the lighting was as natural as possible. Using camera by now was no problem we just had to worry about putting the light in the right place.

I have used Adobe CS4 Photoshop before so the basic skills I already knew how to use it but making our silhouettes was quite complicated at first. We had to first get rid of the background by using the magnetic tool to pick out the pixels around the photo to get as close as possible the picture. Once we were happy with picture we had we put it onto a new layer and used colour overlay which turned it to whatever colour we wanted which was black. Once I had done it once the whole process was quite easy and I feel we used these images as a theme to our music video. I feel I used the technology very well throughout our piece and enjoyed doing it. Editing I have always found fun and think that with the help of my group we used it very well.


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Freya Catmur-Hill's Evaluation - Question Three

Question 3 - What have you learned from you audience feedback?

Our target audience for our video are late teenagers, boys and girls. They enjoy going clubbing in the evening and their typical holiday locations would be somewhere like Ayia Napa or Ibiza. They take good care of their appearance and love to shop. Generally their favourite artists are people like Calvin Harris, Example, Swedish House Mafia, LMFAO and David Guetta. We looked at the original video for ‘Feel So Close’ and we thought the way the narrative shows a few different stories. Our video also shows two different relationships the whole way through, boyfriend and girlfriend and two best friends. From this we hope that the audiences’ from the original video will also be interested in our product.

In our music video we tried to get the audience to have an emotional bond to the characters as we felt this happens in other videos. We did this by making the characters in our video easy to relate to. For example, the costume is basic and nothing you wouldn’t see on a daily basis. We don’t have a villain in our video as the song gives off a good atmosphere. We aimed for the video to give off a feel good vibe. The characters in our video are representing most young adults. This is shown by how we put an effect on the camera to make it shaky and energetic as this is how I think they should see life. I think most people in our target audience will be able to relate to the characters as they are of a similar age and class.

We showed our music video to a selection of our target audience and the feedback we got back was very useful. We gave them all a questionnaire to fill out so we could read our data easily and make it into graphs easier. Most of the people thought our idea of people coming together was very good. We also asked everyone if our video was too similar to the actual video and most said no which was a big help.

Our digipak and advert were also both highly appreciated by our target audience. On both the digipak and the advert, we were told the colours worked well together and made our product memorable. Again on both these auxiliary products the font was commented on. It was said that it worked well with our background as it did not take any attention off it. Most of our audience believes that the images on the digipak show the main point of our music video. Yet again, the main picture on our advert is the silhouettes all linked together to show closeness.


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Freya Catmur-Hill's Evaluation - Question Two

Question Two - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?

In our video we tried to incorporate Richard Dyers Star theory which is used in actual media products. It means that a certain per cent of the video has to be close ups of the artist. This promotes the artist and is used as a branding element. We stuck to the conventions of a music video by doing this as a lot of the videos in our genre that we looked at did this.

With our digipak we stuck to a theme. We thought this would be more memorable and it made all of our products match. The digipak has blocks bright colours and silhouettes which we had made on Photoshop as the front and back images. For the inside, we used shots from the video of Chloe and Jessica who play the best friends, this made the link of people coming together which is the theme of our song. I believe our digipak does conform to the norms of real products as we tried to make it memorable and stand out, but the use of the bright colours would not be seen on most. The font we used, Helvetica, is commonly used in the media business as it is clear but also aesthetically pleasing. Calvin Harris, who is the artist of our song, always produces songs that are very upbeat and funky. We have tried to show this in the digipak with the colour, we also show class because of the simple text and the silhouettes of the women. The idea of our CD cover was to be clear, simple and bold. I feel we managed to create this as I do not feel that it is overcrowded.

Our magazine advert sticks to the same theme so the audience can make the link between the two products, also in our music video we use a section of bright block colour on our lips, at the beginning and when we used green screen. Our magazine advert again used the silhouettes to create an abstract image which again shows people coming together. We looked at other magazine adverts to look at the classical conventions and we saw that a lot have ratings from either celebrity’s in the business or companies that relate to the music industry or to the genre of the album/artist. We used this idea to promote our product. For the audience to see that what they are potentially buying has already been given a rating by someone or something they trust it makes them more likely to buy it.

Overall the combination of all our products together I think is very effective. Both the digipak and the advert are very easily recognisable as being linked because of the editing of both, the colour and the pictures. The digipak has pictures taken from our music video which also show our main message of our video which is people coming together in all different ways.


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Freya Catmur-Hill's Evaluation - Question One

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventional of real media products?
Before making our music video, we did a lot of research and viewed a lot of existing music videos to look at the classic forms of a music video. A lot of the music videos we looked at also kept to a narrative and will carry on the same storyline the whole way though. We found that most music videos will cut on the beat to the music and the cuts will correlate with the pace of the music. The other main research we did was to look at the different theories that are linked with music videos and tried to incorporate the guidelines that professionals will use.

The editing of our music video sticks to the conventions of the established form for a music video. This means we put markers down on the time line in Final Cut to the beats we wanted to use in the music and made sure all of the cuts we made were in time with these. From this we could decide from the music, what pace we wanted out video to be. Mainly, we kept the pace of the editing the same as the music throughout the song. Our use of camera also keeps to the general conventions of a music video. Richard Dyers’ Star theory made a big impact because we made a lot of close ups of the artists face, we also had both the singers on our Digipac.

A few ideas in our music video we have got the initial idea from other products. For example the shot of Chloe in the shower with the water pouring down her face we originally saw from Beyonces video '1+1'. Another video we looked at in great depth is Rihanna's 'We found love'. The reason we looked at this particualr video so much is because the song has the same genre as the one we had chosen and also, that the songs context is the same. The pace of this video is very fast as is our and also there are a few shots with people sped up which we liked.

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Jessica's Evaluation Question 1

Q1.  In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product is mostly concept driven with a slight performance. This is what we wanted to achieve from the beginning when we started thinking of ideas. Conventions of conceptual music videos are a loose story line with random ideas, for example people dancing around a tree.

With our media product we have tried to follow the story of the lyrics. An example is a girl with water running down her face is being shown on the lyrics ‘your love pours down on my surround me like a waterfall’. The water running down her face acts as the waterfall. This is also a typical convention of a conceptual music video. We know this because our idea came from a Beyonce video, where a similar effect is used. So we thought it would work well in our music video.

Although in most music videos the camera follows the main artist for over 70% of the time, which is from Andrew Goodwins 6 point analyse, our music video deviate from this conventional form as there is no main artist. But we do have 2 main characters that singing almost half of the song, which means that we have followed the typical conventions. 

Also because our song we chose only has a few lyrics it would be hard to keep a main artist throughout, as we found it hard to create a story around one person. Instead we have used 5 or 6 characters that feature throughout. 

Our editing of the video is fast paced and mostly on the beat of the music. I feel doing this is makes the image relate to the music, which is also another point from Andrew Goodwin’s. It does this by making the video more interesting and not predictable. Through my research of music videos I have found that most music video will have cuts on the beat at one point but maybe not all the time. On the other hand we have used the beat to make cuts basically for the whole of our video. I think that it has improved the video and makes it look more in time. 

 These 3 images change on the beat

Our song we chose has slow and high tempo and pace that change throughout the song. We have used this to match our images on screen by making a stop motion section at the beginning when the music is at a slow pace and then when it builds up into a faster pace the image on screen gets bigger to relate to the music. 

Regarding intertextuality our forms and conventions of music videos indicate that we have been influenced by other music videos, by creating an alike image for example from the Beyonce and also from Rihanna’s – We Found Love. We have done this by using the idea of filming lots of people walking in fast motion, and using other random ideas to build up to a little story of 2 girls playing in the park together. By researching other videos it has helped us come up with our ideas that we have used to put together our own music video.  

Beyonce Video 1 + 1

Rihanna Video We Found Love

The pictures on top are from Rihanna's video and the pictures on the bottom are from our music video




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