Music Video Analysis Drake - Marvins Room

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Drake Aubrey Graham released Marvins Room on his album Take Care. Drake’s R&B al-bum rocketed through the charts as well as his career all around the world. Marvins Room shows a dark side to drake inside of his head, this contrasts to his other videos which show him as a rich, powerful young artist who is loving his life.

The music video for Marvins Room is a narrative, and similar to most music video’s includes Drake the artist himself. The video shows Drake getting intoxicated as he is out a club/bar. The video gives the audience no indi-cation of time, with camera shots only being shown of night time, which makes the video feel very isolated. This links to the loneliness that Drake is presenting. This loneliness which he is presenting is very different to other hip-hop videos as most of them show the artist surrounded by money, friends and women, whereas in this Drake has opted to show a much more human emotion within his video instead of exacerbating his wealth and power. This non-linear narrative makes the video quite confusing to watch which again links to the artists inner thoughts as well as making the audience want to watch the video in closer detail to work out what is hap-pening, which in my opinion makes the video more interesting.When analysing the characters within the video the only person which is shown throughout is Drake, this again makes the video feel isolated as well as making him the main protagonist.

Throughout video we see many people drinking as well smoking drugs surrounding Drake, we also see a few girls come up to the artist trying to talk to him but his mind his elsewhere. This is interesting as it shows us that even though he has people around him, be thats friends or family he still feels alone, and by getting intoxicated he makes it worse for

himself. In the song a girl can be heard having a telephone conversation, she is also featured in the video. I believe that the girl has been used to also make the audience be-lieve that Drake is having girl problems, and the reason he is so drunk and detached from the people round him is because of her. Again this breaks the conventions of a typical Hip-hop video; while in most videos of this genre

the artists a disrespecting girls and treating them as sex objects, whereas in this Drake misses the girl and shows his true feelings.

!Inside of this video the mis en scene plays a huge part. The video uses an array of a low key colours while emphasising the colours and brightness of lights which have been shot by the camera. This makes the video quite hard to see at times, I believe this has been purposely done to make it more confusing to watch, again re-enforcing the narrative. Alongside the low key colours and bright lights a golden brown and red filter has been used to make the video look even more dream like, or how being drunk visually can look. These tones also contrast with the rich lifestyle Drake lives as well as linking to his new album Take Care, which visually looks the same. In one scene we see the artist looking at himself in a dirty cracked mirror sighing and scratching his head, this suggests he doesn’t like what he see’s which is maybe a real representation of how he feels about his own life.

As well as the colours used in the video the clothing which the characters are wearing also play a large part in the way the it visually forms together. At the start of the video we see a girl wearing hardly anything other than a long top, this creates a sense of realism as this is what girls wear in at home on their own. Drake is seen wear-ing a black hoodie with a huge gold watch on his right wrist, this suggests he has wealth but in this video isn’t dressing to his full potential to show his power. As the video progresses we see other char-acters which are supposed to be Drake’s ‘crew’, they are all wearing either black, white or gold. These 3 colours work perfectly with the way the video looks, furthermore suggesting the wealth and power which as a collective they all hold. !In Marvins Room there is an extremely large array of shots and editing techniques which have been used. For example at the start of the video when the girl is talking on the phone a slight over-

lay of another clip has been used on top of the clip, this makes it look detached from the rest of the video, also again making it feel and look dream like. Further on we see a few scenes of a city being shot from inside of a car as it passes by driving down a road, as this oc-

curs about 2 others scenes are transparently again overlaid on the top. This has been used in-stead of cutting or fading from scene to scene, which I believe makes the video much more interesting to watch.

Overall I think that Marvins Room is incredibly interesting to watch as it gives an insight of an extremely famous artist mental thoughts instead of it being a video surrounding his wealth and party lifestyle. The way it has been filmed and edited together makes it quite difficult yet interesting to watch, but overall a cleverly thought out product.