Music video analysis - 1

The first music video I'm going to analyse is Good For You by Selena Gomez. This music video is a performance video. Although she isn't singing in front of a crowd or audience, she is in fact miming her lyrics and performing to the camera.



Mise-en-scene: The clothing, or lack of, consists of a bright robe that she wears at the start of the music video, then changes to her wearing a white see through shirt with ripped jeans, next we see her just wearing a white shirt. Her choice of clothing helps put a certain message across through the music video, she comes across as 'sexy' and 'appealing to men'. We don't see many props throughout the music video except some furniture now and again, that being a green sofa and a stool. The location that the music video is set seems to be an abandoned warehouse of some sort, it looks run down by how cracked the walls look. The lighting that we see throughout the music video is all quite bright, a lot of the light seems like natural light as we're able to see it come through windows. This lighting could be used to emphasise the mood that the singer is trying to put across.

Angles/shots: We only see a few different shots throughout the music video. These shots would be mid-close ups, close ups, extreme close ups and wide shots. The lack of shots could suggest that the producer wanted to focus only on the character rather than everything else around her, this could be supported by the lack of props in the location. The two angles that I was able to notice was high and low angle. The high angle shot looks down at the character while she's lying on the floor which could suggest that the character is vulnerable and powerless. The low angle shot gives a sense of confusion to the viewer.

Editing: One of the only editing techniques that I could observe was that the shower shots were edited in slow motion. This is because they wanted to create a seductive aura to the video.

Representation: After watching the video, I feel like the character in the video was trying to represent sexuality and lust. The reason I think this is the way she was moving her body and what she was wearing. Her lack of clothing, especially when she was in the shower, brings the viewers attention to her body rather than her as a whole.

Theories: Some parts of Andrew Goodwin's theory can be applied to the music video, one point that Andrew made was frequent references to the notion of looking. The notion of looking includes men or women being portrayed seductively or if their eye makes contact with the camera which we see Selena do a lot throughout the music video. Another point Goodwin made was that the record label demands the need for lots of close ups of the artist, this is also evident throughout the Good For You music video. Laura Mulvey's "Male Gaze" theory could possibly be applied to the music video as the camera lingers on her body and she isn't wearing much clothing so this would catch male attention.