5.Inspiration Genre Research (by Aaron Toombs)

The Weeknd-The Hills

Album-Beauty Behind The Madness

Rather a depressing song which starts off with quite a deep meaning lyrically and visually. The video starts off with a tipped over car as The Weeknd star knocks the door off and walks out, I think the link here is that the lyrics relate to relationships and visually it’s representing the relationship is like a car crash. As he opens the door to let two women out he walks away in pain and the women push him away, again another deep relation to relationships. He mentions half past 5 in the lyrics, sunset in the background represents this time zone. As he leaves the two women behind street lights become apart of the shots whereas near the car the lights are off, perhaps this could represent that his life will be brighter away from her. Perhaps it relates to guilt, he could be cheating and the crash is his karma as he says “I just saw two * before I saw you”. “Send me off to rehab” like cheating is some kind of addiction, or relationship wise he is addicted to his partner. The car blows up as the woman pushes him again, everything is like an explosion/going wrong, his life is blowing up right now, its destructing all at once. He walks towards an empty mansion which could represent how lonely he now is, what he has lost and that he feels empty himself. Lights in the house flicker as he walks by them, perhaps it represents it’s as if he is haunted, everywhere he goes something goes wrong, it follows him and eats away at his mind. At the end he see’s a woman in a red light and you see a close up of his face as he looks depressed, perhaps this is the realisation as to what he’s lost and what was perhaps his fault, the guilt that follows him. 

This song could have some deep meanings behind it and I don’t know if it would be easy for us 4 as a group to represent them in a different way. I like the use of long shots and establishing shots to show what is happening around him and the main close ups which represent his emotions. There’s also a lot of acting involved, firstly hes injured and has to limp but he has to be depressed and cry at the same time. A ;lot of these scenes would be difficult to complete, location wise we couldn’t use half of the scenes which were in there. We could change up the scenes and create our own way of it, even the fire could be included as one of us has a relative who has regular bonfires in a field he owns. There will need to be multiple health and safety precautions and a lot of these scenes would be too dangerous to do, we cant tip a car over and make it explode especially. However he was driving so we could have a camera on the dash board, film some mirror shots etc just to represent our way of the introduction.