Tuesday, 7 September 2010

Touch My Body(2008)- By Mariah Carey (Video Analysis)

Touch My Body, is a more narrative based video, with subtle elements of Performance fit in there. The story begins with a tracking shot of an Engineer pulling up to the lead singers house, where a series of MCU's and reverse shots take place as a brief bit of dialogue takes place between them before the actual song begins, we establish that the lead singer is regonised as her real life persona, which can explain her wealth which we can see from her estate.







In addition we can see from the Costume used in the video, how exposed Mariah looks trying to give off a provacative image, whereas the male in the video is shown to be in direct contrast with his glasses and Id which reads "Compu Nerd" And while this ties in with narrative of the video, which is later seen to be a fantasy of the Compu nerd and his activities with the lead singer(Even in his fantasies, she is seen as the more glamourous through her use of costume), it also shows her to be the one in the spotlight and the one to ultimately get more attention, which can relate to Goodwin's theory of how the artist tries to sell their images in their videos. Their is also sometimes an illustrative link between the visuals and the lyrics in the song. Such as Phrases such "Youtube" where we can see the lead singer pointing to a computer or "Camera" where we can see her pretending to take a picture with her hands.




The rest of the video, is shown to be perormance based, we see that the fantasies of the Compu Nerd are enacted in the rest of the video, while the song is sung by the lead singer and she gets the majority of the camera time, and the ideas of the lead singer getting the main focus as well as incorporating subtle hints of performance is something seen in alot of RnB videos which Touch My Body also does. Through the "Fantasy" sequence of the song, we can also see various changes of location, shown through jump cuts, this shows us that R&B videos like to alter the location reasonably alot, maybe to fit in with the needs of their audience.
















1 comment:

  1. Some of your ideas loss to the fit between image and text.

    Not all Goodwins points of analysis have been applied. Please see examples of good work to help you prouduce a more indepth analysis

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