Vernallis has consistently explored new aesthetic developments in the audiovisual medium, both in terms of its form, meaning and transmedia authorship. After music videos first came to prominence in the 1980s, she argues, music videos have entered the era of the ‘hybrid aesthetic’ with advanced digital technology, transmedia authorship, and a new potential for transmedia expression.

 “There is also my own, which considers the ways sound and image reflect individual parameters such as narrative, teleological drive, harmony, timbre, rhythm, and so forth” (Carol Vernallis, 2013, p209). Originally, I wanted to use some secondary composed music videos as an example to discuss the understanding of the same song in the form of video images by people with different experiences. But as these were informal, they were dropped.

The next song used as an example is ‘Practice Love’ from JJ Lin. The song was inspired by JJ Lin for someone who liked him and is an expression of JJ Lin’s apology and remembrance for this friend, who died in a plane crash in 1997. The music video, directed by Xu Yunxuan and featuring the voices of JJ Lin and Guo Caijie, took nearly six months to produce and is a musical animation to express the theme of “the strongest third party is never someone else, but fate”. In the music video, JJ LIn plays a programmer whose girlfriend, a botanist, is killed when a meteor swarm hits a spacecraft during a routine exploration mission. Grief-stricken, he develops a program that allows memories to be transformed into virtual visuals, through which everyone can see the person they miss most again at any time, but which also leads to many people drowning in memories, unable to distinguish between reality and memory. This is the first short musical film I have come across that is not live action but animated and synthesized, and tells a relatively complete story in just a few minutes based on the creator’s own experiences.

Ziting Hu

Carole Vernallis, ‘Music Video’s Second Aesthetic’, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema, 207-233

Qiao, S. (2018) 林俊杰”修炼爱情”背后的故事 致104人遇难的胜安航空185号航班_客机, _客机. Available at: https://www.sohu.com/a/248979766_332162 (Accessed: November 27, 2022).