Critical Reflection
How do your products represent social groups or issues?
The song I chose focuses on a toxic relationship, expressed by the lyrics "user 603, he beats her down with nasty words." The song also mentions a theme of unrequited love, "user 139 will never know how much I love her." And my favorite part, the song includes a bit of postmodernism, "this is a simulation, this is a simulation..." Throughout the song the singer expresses how she's watching this User 139 via computer. The lyrics I mentioned above are what inspired the storyline in the video. I chose to portray this toxic situationship and their breakup.
As someone who has gone through a similar situation, I wanted to express the process and decision making in a breakup. Specifically, how it looks to actively get over someone or to dwell on someone. I portrayed this by showing user139 calling this user603 and even going all the way to his apartment, trying to get him back. And then user139 going out with friends having fun in the moment, trying not to think about him. In the video, I also include flashbacks of 139's and 603's relationship, portraying both the good and bad aspects. Making sure to capture how he abused her to include the toxic situationship theme. After showing the video to a couple of my friends, I believe that I represented the toxicity and breakup process pretty well.
How do elements of your production work together to create a sense of "branding"?
At first, I really had no idea on how I wanted to represent the artist. So I didn't. The artist doesn't want to show their face, so I decided to be the face of the her brand. Another artist that doesn't show their face and chooses to have someone else be the brand face is Sia, with Maddie Ziegler as her face. My artist's name is SeVEN, like the number, so I took what I could from that, posted her necklace of '777' on social media and ran with it.
In the video, I included a scene, where User139 is staring a screen of hearts, I didn't know it then, but that would become a major part of the artist's branding. The same hearts ended up on the cover art of the song. Later on, I decided that neon hearts would become part of her brand. The physicality of my brand is very clear despite my artist not having a face. With the combination of sevens, blue hearts, the color blue overall, and a cyber sort of aesthetic.
Looking at the personality aspect of the brand, the Instagram page we created, its very up close and personal without revealing the face of the artist. Posts are very random and do not follow a specific pattern or theme, kind of like Joji's Instagram page. The tone received from the music video and song is very melancholic and mesmerizing. The artist is faceless clearly representing a value of privacy to their own life.
Consumers can hope to find in our products, relatability to the artist and quality products from the artist. Due to the artist social media being random posts about her life, it tends to feel more personal instead of professional, allowing the consumers to view the artist as more of another human being instead of a idolized celebrity.
How do your products engage with the audience?
My target audience is females, ages ranging from 14-25, from a middle class background who enjoy artists such as Melanie Martinez, Fae, Poppy, and Sofia Isella. Though User139 is the artist's top song, it doesn't have the most plays. Overall, she has about 26,400 monthly listeners, who also listen to the artists I mentioned above.
One of the key aspects of the music video is the parallel storylines indicated by different colored lighting in the clips sort of went over the viewers' head, if I hadn't explained it afterwards. It wasn't that they didn't notice the difference in the clips and what the lighting meant, but that they didn't realize it was two storylines going on at the same time. I believe if I had made the lighting more consistent throughout the later clips, it would've been clearer.
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
In my research for this project, I studied to main artists; Joji and Yeat. Though they are from entirely different genres, they have some of the most engaging music videos I've ever seen. I've previously mentioned the narrative structure of Joji's 'Gimme Love' music video and how it's just a bunch of mini clips put together to create a story. I used the same structure in my video.
The song I chose has a lyric, a lyric that allowed me to sprinkle some postmodernism in my project. Before the portfolio projects started, my teacher had taught a unit on postmodernism. We studied the film, Memento (2000) in class and I studied Inception(2010) by myself. After writing a paper on what I learned of postmodernism, I realized I had fallen in love. I knew the second I heard' "this is a simulation, this is a simulation...," in the song, I was going to include my little hints of postmodernism in the video.
The way I used postmodernism in my project was by not only having the Joji narrative structure, but scattering the clips over two storylines happening at the same time. For example: User139 is out with her friends getting over user603, that clip having red lighting. Followed by , User139 dwelling on her ex alone in her room, the clip having blue lighting. The two storylines are differentiated by the different colors, something I picked up from Memento.
Another little peak of postmodernism used in my video is how the narrator is watching User139. I portray the narrator as a female sat at a computer, where she's booting up a sort of simulation game from a website called CreateYourUser. In the video, there's input from the narrator that 139 can see as a hologram. 139's understanding of the Narrator is that she's a god or angel that watches over her, not knowing that she, herself, is just a character in a simulation created by the narrator.
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