Ballad codes and conventions

Some key codes and conventions of Ballads are a solo voice with a piano playing in the background often with a story being told in the lyrics and in the music video. These are normally based on love, sadness, loss or anger. The music tries to reflect the mood and emotions conveyed in the song by using harmonic usually slow rhythms. The songs build up in intensity as the song progresses.

Music videos give close - ups of the artists to install the idea of star image. The lightening depends on the mood of the song and the music videos are usually narrative based where there is a match between lyrics and visuals.

Theme:

Generally in love ballads, there is a narrative as this tends to be more popular with the viewers as they are able to connect and relate. If the song is about a story of how two people met and fell in love, it is more than likely that the video will reflect this, often quite literally. Most love ballads do play out perfect love situations, which tend to be quite surreal as this idea of perfection isn't very realistic, but they set it out like this so it appeals to the viewer who would be able to imagine that the character in the story is them. For example Ed Sheeran's Perfect music video.

Lighting:

This is very important in love stories as the right lighting sets the right atmosphere. There will be a lot of soft illumination as this tends to cast shadows with soft edges. To get the right kind of lighting, two things have to be taken into consideration, the distance from the light source (the closer it is the softer the light will be) It is also essential to make the lighting look natural.

Editing:

Soft and subtle editing and transitions mainly used to indicate the state of the relationship (if the video is about that) so everything looks smooth. It also relaxes the viewer because they can tell by the editing that the video will be dreamy and slow so nothing bad will happen.

An example of this is Beyonce's music video of the song "If I were a boy" it clearly matches all of these conventions. Some shots are just focused on her face showing her as the star of the video. The whole video is in black and white representing the mood of the song and the video is based on the narrative meaning that both lyrics and visuals match. The editing is not too complicated, there is a lack of transitions because as the codes and conventions mention, this relaxes the viewer and makes them concentrate more on what the story is actually telling.