Intertextuality Feature

Jessie J's 'Who You Are' video: Jump Cut feature

When we chose to pick the song ‘Who You Are’ by Jessie J, we knew that we wanted to convey how the artist is feeling through the dramatise of performance and the fast editing – in particular the jump cuts. When we watched the original music video to ‘Who You Are’, it was solely based on Jessie J’s performance and how passionately she was able channel the lyrics across to the audience. Even though I was not a huge fan of the song, what made me accept it was how we could show in our version of our music video the meaning of the song and how we have interpreted it through the performance. One way that we were inspired from the original music video was the jump cuts used when she starts singing – “Yes no’s, egos, fake shows, like boom, just go, and leave me alone, real talk, real life, good luck, good night”, it clearly shows how both the editing of jump cuts and the performance was able to illustrate her state of mind – going from back and forth to show how unclear she is of herself and trying to seek who she is. This intertextuality feature of the jump cuts was very useful to us when we were filming because we wanted to convey this meaning of the song. 

Our Version of 'Who You Are' video: Jump Cut feature

In our own version of this particular scene, we planned that we wanted to film in the park because we felt that this would be the ideal place to show a contrast of our artist trying to find who she really is in an environment where you are meant to be having fun. We deliberately chose to film on the climbing frame because of the colours: red and yellow, which we thought might illustrate her feelings and the metaphor for the climbing frame, almost climbing the top of your own mountain to find the answer that you are looking for – Who You Are. The jump cut effect we hoped to achieve was to show her state of mind and how she is going from one place to another, almost seeking for it in every direction.