Comparisons and Intertextual Features

Our music video isn’t just surrounded by the effects of what editing has to offer but it also circles around the performance of our artist and how she can covey the feeling of the song towards the audience. Our artist is Yumi and she was able to deliver a high standard form of acting and illustrating her ability to lip sync and perform.


The performance in our video needed to be very accurate to reflect the intensity of the song. When it became powerful, Yumi needed to look and act powerful and when it needed to be intimate and peaceful she did exactly that.

We wanted to use some intertextuality features from the original music video because we felt that those scenes capsulated the feeling of the song. Here you can see that Jessie J is sitting on the bed with her legs pressed against herself, we really love this stance that Jessie J is in because it shows very strongly through her facial expressions and movement that she feels lonely, insecure and unhappy. We wanted to convey this exact feeling with our artist in our video so we had Yumi sitting in the corner of the empty room, laying her head against the wall. Even though its not exactly the same, we tried to show the similar feelings that they both show. The emptiness in both shots show very vividly of the separation that they both have from themselves, losing their identity by forgetting who they are, not feeling comfortable with themselves.  

In this scene, it was vital that we had a medium close up shot of our artist singing. We saw from the original video of the medium close up shot of Jessie J singing towards the camera and how powerful she emits her feelings to the audience, it also makes the audience feel connected with her. We wanted to show this as well so we filmed our own version of the medium close up shot except our one has lighting in the background that is shining towards the camera giving it that soft, glare look. It really works effectively because there’s a softness about our scene – reflecting how she is feeling inside. 

What we really loved about the performance from Jessie J from the original music video was that she uses her hands to illustrate how she is feeling, the hands clenching shows how passionate she feels. Her mouth widening shows the intensity of the words. We really love this and wanted our artist Yumi to illustrate this. Here you can see that she is performing by using her hand gestures and facial expressions to covey the feeling of the song and to dramatise the performance to make it look realistic and over emphasised. Having our artist performing her heart out reflects perfectly towards the song and lyrics and it convinces the audience to feel sympathy and empathy, so that they can relate to it, as we all related to the original song and video when we first heard it.