Narrative Based Music

VideoThe A Team

Ed Sheeran

This Narrative Music Video has a single storyline running through it that is related to the lyrics of the song. In this case, the story is based around a young female actress, not the artist themself. The three images on the left emphasise the idea of narrative music videos having a stronger focus on locations and mis-en-scene.

All three images are long shots in order to give the audience a wider view of the background and thus get more of an insight into the story’s settings. Also, the wide shot allows the audience to gain a better understanding of and relate to the main character’s feelings. The story follows a female struggling with an addiction to a ‘Class A drug’.

The Artist explained that the songwriting process came from an experience he had when he did a gig at a homeless shelter. This predominantly was the inspiration behind the song and the music video incorporated this also. This is an ‘Illustration narrative genre’ as the narrative closely reflects the lyrical content of the song.

Much like most performance based videos, narrative music videos also tend to use a variety close up shots. However in narrative based videos, these are used to reinforce the storytelling element and connect the audience with the main character. The close up shows clearly the expression and feeling of the individual and helps the story to make more sense. Whereas, performance music videos tend to use close ups to simply highlight the lip synching of the artist and illustrate them as the ‘star’.

These close-up shots help the audience to understand the theme of the story and consider how the character is feeling at different points in the video. Despite them being close-up, the frame still shows some of the background and mis-en-scene and thus still emphasises the narrative and the relationship of the location to the character. For instance, the top shot implies her feelings for the outdoors park location as positive through her side profile smile. There is no lip-synching as it allows the story to be much more realistic, relatable and engaging for audiences.