Research Blog: Music Video Conventions

 To start off, in the music video for the song 'In Your Eyes' by The Weeknd, he is in this costume consisting of a red suit with a black shirt and tie, black pants, glasses and a bandage over his broken nose. He portrays this character throughout his entire album as this emotionless man. In the video it starts out with him in an elevator as a young woman and man walk in, he then commits a murder which was the man and the young woman is now running away form him throughout most of the video with blood all over her. There multiple settings throughout the video like the elevator, the road she was running on, the telephone booth, a building in which had dark red lighting where she was hiding from The Weeknd's character, and a club. In the video there was different lighting which helped give that eerie and suspenseful effect in the video. This lighting was more of low lighting, the low red lighting used in the building and in the club, flashy lighting also used in the club, and natural lighting towards the end of the video. There was also multiple camera angles and movements used in the video such as clos-up shots, zoom ins, establishing shots, mid and long shots, canted angles, etc. The props in the video were a knife, an axe, and The Weeknd's character's head. The song is about how Abel (The Weeknd) is trying to persuade for his partner to meet him at his own emotional position in which he wants to actually commit himself to her. He opens up about how he feels and knows that his partner comes off as an emotionless person, but knows that she is just acting like this on the surface. He knows that deep down she has feelings for him too, but she continues to not show it. He explains this by singing "In your eyes, I see there's something burning inside you". However in the video, it seems as if he is the emotionless one, and she is the scared one. In majority of the video she is running away from which this portrays her running from her feelings from him. Then towards the end of the video when he finally stops her she decapitates his head with an axe which portrays how as soon as he decided to commit to her, she didn't hesitate to reject him. After she kills him, she doesnt seem scared at all, takes the head and dances with it in the club and on the roof of the building, while she is happy. This portrays her independence and why he failed to persuade her to commit to him.