The Weeknd - After Hours FMV
The Weeknd - After Hours FMV
So if you guys follow by blog, you would know I'm pretty full on obsessed with The Weeknd's After Hours album and era. And the trend continues as I devoted a few hours to editing a music video fan edit for the title track that didn't get a music video but a dialogue-less and music-less short film. I've had this idea to put together this edit for some time using the short film but when I actually sat down and skimmed the short's footage I found it lacking footage to fill out the 6 minute run time. So I looked to the other videos: Heartless, Blinding Lights, In Your Eyes, Until I Bleed Out, Too Late, and Save Your Tears. I even looked into incorporating all of his live performance footage of late night or SNL or music awards shows but decided not to use them as it wouldn't make much sense visually or thematically.
Another source of inspiration (as well as what I didn't want to duplicate) was a fan video that exists on the internet which you can watch here. What I came up with ended up happening when I synced the electro dance production section when the beat kicks in around 02:12. This is the source of the entire structure of the eventual final edit. It was clear to me, then, that the bulk of the video that I made edits to would be filling in this two and a half minute dance production section in between the three and a half minutes of the first and third acts of the song, which play like a dark synth-wave song of introspection scored by Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin actually co-wrote some songs on the album when they probably linked on Uncut Gems). The visual cues led me here, as well: as the synthesizer progression builds up, The Weeknd's character is violently thrust into this spiral of a sort of acid flashback and the beat aggressively kicks in. I knew right then and there to pull clips of all the trippy visuals from previous music videos and puzzle together some visual themes to match the lyrics.
I initially wanted to just make this as simple as possible. But as I pulled clips from the videos, notably Heartless & Blinding Lights, I noticed a visual similarity in some of the shots so I incorporated them and aligned them appropriately to some of the lyrics. Some of them just matched by happenstance but mostly I arranged them around to match, like the tongue sticking out came from three shots in the Heartless video so I matched it with the shot from Blinding Lights. And then in Blinding Lights, the character is running from the bouncers in the night club and matches with him running down the strip in Heartless, so I just extended that running scene when I pulled the clip from Heartless.
From Genius.com:
“After Hours” is the title track and the third promotional single for The Weeknd’s fourth studio album After Hours. The song addresses a failed relationship that ended in heartbreak and serves as an apology letter for his past transgressions, as he desires reconciliation.
Additionally, the song’s dark vibes and altered vocals over hard-hitting production are reminiscent of styles seen on Abel’s earlier music such as November 2012’s Trilogy. The track is also thematically similar to songs from that era, as he once again details the pain and anguish associated with heartbreak."
From Wiki:
"After Hours" is a "dark, swirling" and "ominous" electro and house composition.
The lyrics of the song discuss the Weeknd's desire to have children and his wish to get back with an ex-girlfriend. It also references the on-and-off relationship that Tesfaye has with model Bella Hadid.
According to Sheldon Pearce of Pitchfork, the track "opens with his old signature style - falsetto, echoes, and recurrent tones - until suddenly it erupts into dance production".
The inclusion of footage from In Your Eyes, Until I Bleed Out, & Too Late also make for an interesting shift of meaning to the original lyrics. Lyrics like 'My darkest hours' or 'I put myself to sleep Just so I can get closer to you inside my dreams' are pretty straight forward and melancholy concerning heartbreak and remorse and longing. But put into the context of images like Abel's severed head (In Your Eyes & Too Late) and him in an afterworld-like desert and an end of the world type party in Until I Bleed Out, it gives the video unintended dark, suicidal, and nightmarish netherworld-esque connotations to the video (After Hours always sounded like an end of the party song to me), like he is saying 'I put myself to sleep... forever'. I am very proud of that, but I won't take any credit as it just goes to show how connected the visuals and themes are in this era. I've been saying that all along in my most recent blog posts and now I get to witness it first hand compiling and connecting various footage from said era. I just hope it touches, even for a smidgen, the genius of this artist and this album.
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