Award Winning Music Videos

In this blog post I researched 3 different award winning music videos and evaluating these points: How they use verse and chorus, how they use the beat and rhythm, how they showcase the star, how the visuals relate to the lyrics, what the concept is, what ideas do they give me for my own music video.

The 2016 MTV Music Video Awards were held on August 28, 2016 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. The awards were divided down into genres and up to 5 songs were nominated for each award. In the Hip Hop category, the music video that won was: Hotline Bling, Drake (below). The way that Drake has used the lyrics, seems that in the verses he is trying to tell the story and relationship between him and whoever he is talking about. He also uses the chorus to reset the lyrics so that he can talk about another situation about this relationship in the next verse. I have noticed by watching the music video that the last two words of the sentence, the beat goes lower than the rest in that line, also there seems to be an emphasis put on those words where the beat would drop or again the sound would be quieter. I have also noticed some of the dancing scenes in the clip doesn't match the beat of the song but it does match the rhythm and tempo. In the video it is obvious who the star is because he is the one always singing and dancing. He is also the one that wears the bright clothing and has a lot more screen time than the rest of the people in the video. The lyrics link to the video slightly because at the beginning you can see a call centre and the lyrics talk about calling on the 'Hotline Bling'. Other than that, the visuals don't relate to the lyrics because it is purely just Drake dancing. I think the concept is just Drake trying to get across the lyrics of the song, I also believe that it could be him trying to get the lyrics to sell the song and not the video. I have had some ideas when creating my music video that I will try and keep the video very simple but with lots of colour so it can put emphasis on the mood and emotions of the song, I believe that if there is too much happening in the video, then the song would be spoiled. I also think I need some sort of dancing in the video, so you can give off what type of vibe it is; linking that back to Drake's song, you can tell that the vibe and mood of the song is very chilled, so you wouldn't necessarily play the song in a nightclub but you may listen to it on the radio.

I then looked at the AMA (American Music Awards) for 2016 and there were 2 runners up, but Sorry by Justin Bieber (below) was the winner for the best music video award. This award was for the Hip Hop genre only. In the R&B/Soul the winner for the best artist was Chris Brown as they do not give best video for each genre. The lyric layout are slightly different to Drake's lyrics because Justin Bieber has added a pre-chorus as well. The way that the verses work is that he is explaining his reasons & the story, then the pre-chorus is used as an introduction to what he is going to say in the chorus. The way that the beat and the rhythm is portrayed is by the dancing as they move in tune with the beat. In this video we don't actually see the star, we only see the dancers who are equally divided with screen time and costume choice. Also there seems to be no link between the lyrics and the visuals, the only time I see them link is when the lyrics say "is it too late now to say sorry" and the dancer moves her fingers in the sign of 'no'. I don't think there is a concept to this video as  I just think that it is more of a creative thing and not to have a story as the video. I personally don't think that I would take any ideas from it as it doesn't match the feelings I wanted to get from the video.