Interpreting Music

Firstly we listened to a song, we didn't know the name or the artist to this song, however we were asked to write down how the song made us feel, writing down different emotions and thoughts that we had about the song. After listening to it several times we then were asked to think of a music video and briefly storyboard our ideas.
 My idea was very simplistic as i thought the song itself was simplistic with only a guitar his voice and the occasional beats from a tambourine. I decided in my music video for this particular song that the man would be caring his guitar around to different places and each place you would see him performing parts of the song. These different places consisted of a wood and streets etc with him eventually finishing the song in a retro bar on a stool.

After we completed this task individually we then shared our ideas and realised  how similar all of our music video storyboards were, all with elements of performance ,narrative and context. We then understood that all music videos follow conventions and to be successful we must have an element of narrative/context with performance.

After doing this task, we then were given the lyrics to the song along with the name of the artist. We then analysed the lyrics and changed anything from our storyboard that we felt necessary. At first i though the song was happy with a catch chorus and verses however, once i looked at the lyrics and saw the repetition of the world 'Gun' used lot along with words such as 'crash' and 'blast' I took a different look on the song as a whole and changed my opinions slightly, deciding that it wasn't a happy song as I first thought but perhaps a sad song bout lovers in conflict. However I still thought that this song had hope in and was about a journey so i decided that my storyboard wasn't going to change apart from darkening the colours in the music video.

Next, we viewed the the actual music video for the song 'Life Is A Gun' by Jay Malinowski. The music video itself is very different from what i expected, firstly its all in black and white, while i pictured colour, furthermore it has no performance in it just a strong narrative that fixates around this couple. After i watched it I had many ideas as to what it could be interpreted as; i thought that it might be an abusive relationship or something that starts as fun  ( taking the gun ) but becomes more serious as the male starts to get agitated about her taking the gun and she is just reacting to his behavior. Someone suggested that they could be two people who have committed a crime and now have to stay together to keep another safe