Lip Syncing Research

My group and I had a discussion about our artist, within this discussion we decided that it would be better and more accessible to have an actor lip sync of a song in which will choose. This will also make it simpler in terms of narrative due to the fact that it means our video will be narrative based meaning it will contain mostly footage that attempts to tell a story through the moving image; music videos that are narrative usually have a story line that is linked to the lyrical content. Moreover, using an existing songs allows us to focus hugely on narrative in order to create a story line that expresses these lyrics and appeals to the target audience. Therefore because of this choice I feel that it is necessary that I take time to undertake research into lip syncing in order to understand how it works, how to perfect it myself and how existing videos use this technique.

Years & years - Take Shelter

Within this music video it is an amplified structured video meaning both narrative and some performance aspects are used to amplify the song and also the narrative. Lip syncing is used throughout the video both in a small performance way and within the narrative. By doing this it ties the two scenes together, I really like this idea as it doesn’t separate the two recordings up but pulls them into one. 

THE 1975 - Chocolate

This video is very similar as the years & years music video; however, it is more illustrated due to the song lyrics being explored within the video. For example, the lyrics “and my car smells like chocolate” is empathised the fact that they are in a car throughout the majority of the video. Once again the different settings are pulled together through the lip syncing and there is no distinct setting for lip syncing and another for narrative.

One Republic - Counting Stars

This video clearly distinguishes narrative and performance well by ‘lip-syncing’ as a performance and only at this setting. It allows the narrative part of the video to be cut to a different setting and show no connection between the two. This disjuncture type music shows us that the narrative holds very little relationship to the song. 

This has shown me the difference in terms of lip syncing throughout the genre, from this being focused mainly on the performance or mixed together within the narrative as well. Personally, I prefer the way the lyrics are connected through the narrative in order to put importance on them as I feel this is a really important aspect.