Kenya Bell

Shot Count for Katy Perry Music Video ‘Roar’

While watching this music video I counted all the times the shots changed, I counted 134 shots. During these shots Katy crash landed, learnt survival techniques, and made friends with animals. This video cannot follow the typical characteristics of the pop genre in relation to the latest fashion, because it needs to look like Katy has been in the wild for a long time. Meaning her clothes need to be ripped and worn down. The other genre characteristics Katy follows, she has bright colours, close-ups, repeated chorus etc. Katy Perry makes this video her own, she is the main focus more than usual compared to other music videos. She is always part of the narrative and the performance is included within the narrative.

Laura Mulvey theory stating “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, meaning the audience is placed in the scene as a male point of view. So Katy Perry encourages this theory because she is looking straight at the audience and being sexualising, also she dresses with less clothing making her more sexualised toward men. This also make the men more interested in the video.

However the audience is put into the mind of being a child with reference to cartoons at the beginning. It does quickly change to the male gaze but there was a slight change in audience view.

Kenya Bell

There are some computer generated images involved in this music video, the main one was hen the fireflies all came together and turned into a tiger head. Most of the CGI’s are of the tiger, this shows the audience how much the tiger rules the wild and what challengers Katy faces.

When Katy is being watched by the tiger it blurs the outside of the screen to leave Katy’s body in plain sight again giving the impression that a male is the audience. It also makes the audience feel like the predator because they are looking through the tigers eyes.

Throughout the video you have typical shots such as medium, long and close-ups. The long shots set the scene for the audience. The medium shots allow the audience to see what Katy is doing and gives them a chance to focus on what she is doing, this is for the narrative. Close-ups are typically producer’s demands as long as the artist is being shown that their audience will want to watch the music video and they will be interested in it.