Characteristics

RUN THE WORLD

The leading singer of “Run this Town” Jay-Z is a very powerful and almost dominant male that portrays himself as the leader of a gang. There are two other artists Rihanna and Kanye West that are portrayed as part of his crew all dressed up in black to connote their allegiance to him. However their status still is very powerful in the video. At the beginning of the video its shows at least a whole town of people dressed up in black with weapons such as wooden sticks with fire lit on them, baseball bats and also chains. The characteristics of these people are fairly obvious to understand due to the props they have and the clothes they are wearing.

In my music video, there is a scene where there are two boys that join up to ambush another person. I used this video to inspire me of the type of characteristics that I would like both characters in the music video to have. It is important that both characters have to act fearless and reckless just like in the music video “run this town”.

Normally in music videos women tend to act and look sexy to attract the male viewers however in this approach Rihanna has gone for a more hood-rat look to show that she cannot be messed with. Even though I do no not have any female characters in my video, I thought that her characteristics in this video would suit one of my characters in my music video very well. Rihanna has black jumper which represents the colours of the gang and has gold on her jumper to differentiate herself with the other members of the gang since she is the only woman within the group.

The lyrics “We gone run this town tonight” emphasises that Jay-z Rihanna and Kanye West are in cause to take over a town with their crew behind them with weapons. The dim light from the fire and the smoke connotes the danger that lies ahead and there could be a

potential war about to transpire. This image of part of the member of the crew immediately gives the viewers and image that he is dangerous, due to the tattoos on his arm and the black bandana around his face.

GHETTO GOSPEL

The leading singer in this song 2 Pac is characterised in this video as a very humble man who was living life until he got shot and died. This video inspired me to use the part of when he gets shot and is a ghost at the end of the video. I took the aspect of a character getting killed however instead of being killed by a gun, I used a knife as a prop just to be a little different. We also vividly a gang in a car as they pull out a gun to shoot the main character in the music video.

I took the aspect of the main character at the brink of death and added it to my music video. Moreover there is also a part where there is an exchange between money which I thought would be a great idea to use in my music video. However since my music video was more to do with Soho I thought it would be better if two characters exchanged drugs. The characteristics represented in this video are very street wise. Everybody is doing their own thing in the streets. There are a lot of males in the video with hoodies and era hats on which represents that they may be part of a gang.