Eminem - Love The Way You Lie ft. Rihanna (analysis)

This music video is shot in many different areas from inside to outdoors. This video is seen to be narrative based telling a hurtful story. Rihanna’s music videos and songs have mainly been about something about her life. Here she is talking about men being liars and how it hurts women. 

The main genre of this song is R&B/hip-pop. As soon as the video starts we instantly get a close-up of rihanna telling us that she is the main singer in this song. Looking at her facial expression you can see she isn’t very happy. We hear diegetic sound of rhianna when she is singing. The lighting in this particular picture is very low key emphasising the mood of the song.  

Here you can see the narrative getting together. Whilst rhianna is singing, the camera cross cuts to something else. This clearly reflects the visuals being herd. In this picture you can see that the man is getting hit by the women for a reason that he may have done something wrong. This shows rhianna feelings.

This is another location where this video takes place. You can see by the lighting that it is shot during the day in a field. Here we see Eminem singing. The video cuts between both singers. This is a good technique to use as it builds a relationship between one another creating a narrative for the song. This is also different to most R&B videos as they are mostly performance based.  

I think this is a interesting shot as it can mean a lot of things. Here we say a women sitting almost mediation with a flame within her hands. These external shots build up the video and the narrative. We here rhianna singing in the background, saying “its alright because i love the way you lie”. This clearly goes with what’s been shown in the scene.

Here you can see a form of voyeurism. We can see a man and a women kissing and expressing love. This is very common in videos, especially in the R&B genre. This shot is shown when rhianna says “just gono stand there and watch me burn” you can see that she is trying to say that men and women fight in a relationship but also make love after. The camera shows the same people fighting then making love again.

Overall i decided to choose this video because of the cross cutting between pictures. I like the way the visuals went with the lyrics. Also the pace of this video is very slow. This helps build the narrative.