Inspirational music video: In The Night - The Weeknd

This brilliant new music video from The Weeknd starring Bella Hadid, incorporates a range of techniques which we would like to try and apply to our music video.

First and foremost, I love the colour symbolism in the music video. The use of the colour red, whether it is the camera filter, costume, blood or even the backdrop, all seems to accentuate the idea of female empowerment, which ties in really well with the bloody feminist revenge fantasy narrative. This is something we are trying to emphasize in our own video, to connote femininity.

The element of smoke is also brought about in multiple settings, which looks really effective and adds to the esoteric atmosphere in the video. We have also tried to use smoke, as it links with our lyric "smoke as black as charcoal". The use of superimposition when The Weeknd is signing works to create depth, filling the frame with various images at different focal lengths. This emphasizes his star image and creates an appeal for the artist, linking to Richard Dyer's theory.

 

The notion of looking, or voyeuristic treatment (linked to Andrew Goodwin's theory) of the female body is completely flipped in this video. With Bella playing the role of a gogo dancer at a strip club, the perspective that the audience expect to take is that of the heterosexual male, however the audience are shown shots in both perspectives and the eyes of the dancers themselves are frequently shown glaring in cutaways, which destroys Laura Mulvey's 'male gaze' theory and creates a heavy female dominance in the video.

The vintage filter gives the video a retro/ aged look, almost like an old film. The grungy edge, highlights the gritty truths of the underground business which many young women in this area of work are subjected to. This is demonstrated in the screenshot accompanied with the lyric in the caption below, which again links to Goodwin's association between visuals and lyrics.

"yeah she was young and she was forced to be a woman"

A mixture of fast and slow paced editing is used, according to the tempo of the song.

The song is also paused at different points in the video, to draw the audience's attention to the strong narrative storyline. This is a really useful technique which we could apply to our video to engage with our audience. The full video is linked below, in which the quick cuts and montage editing can be seen much more clearly: