The media text I created is based on Olivia Rodrigo’s song called “Good 4 U” which is about a teenage girl throwing shade towards her ex-boyfriend who quickly moved on from their relationship. The reason why I chose this song is because many people, especially teenagers and young adults, have experienced a toxic relationship and getting their hearts broken. The feeling of insecurity, despair, anger and confusion immediately taking over one’s thoughts, moreover if it is seeing your first love moving on is a heart shattering experience audiences can relate to. This is why most of the mise-en-scene supported by camerawork as well as the emotions we wanted to convey throughout all the media texts is surrounded by the same social issue, which is heartbreak and toxic love.
The music video shows the stages of grief of a heartbreak. The first stage is shock where we decide to depict this emotion through Caylee, who plays Olivia, just going about her day driving in her car when she notices her ex-boyfriend going on a date with a new girl. The second stage is pain when she realizes her relationship is truly over and her head is currently all over the place. This could be seen when Caylee came back to her room to lounge on her bed, crying in a corner and hiding in her closet with all her energy drained whilst reminiscing about their relationship and remembering more of the good times instead. The third stage is anger where Caylee finally realizes that it is best that their toxic relationship ended and how she should also get over him. Here we can see that she gathered up her courage to discard all the memories related to her ex-boyfriend by ripping and burning their polaroids and throwing away the gifts from him such as the teddy bear. The fourth and last stage is depression in which the reality of the relationship ending truly sets in and Caylee is succumbed with emptiness and loneliness. Although their relationship was toxic, she feels a sense of overwhelming sadness that he has already found someone else since she still has love for her ex-boyfriend. By showcasing these different feelings throughout the music video, it makes it easy for audiences to relate to as these are the common emotions everyone experiences through a heartbreak.
For the digipak, we wanted to highlight the color red to symbolize how heartbroken and angry Caylee was so we used red lighting and colored the water red. The rose petals that are plucked and placed in the water are supposed to represent love loss and letting go whilst the knife represents pain and being betrayed. The font used for the album name ‘SOUR!’ has a mixed match magazine like font to give a sense of chaos and in an unordered state but still remembering the past which further emphasizes the toxic love feeling that is normal after going through a break up.
The social media also uses the same color scheme of red and a rose to again amplify the feeling of rage and confusion Caylee is going through thus allowing our audience to relate with her more in depth.
We chose red as our main color to tie all the media products together as a form of branding since it signifies the feeling of anger, psychotic behavior and heartache. This is why our digipak, social media, lyric booklet and photocards are mainly colored red to show that these emotions are almost entirely consuming Caylee’s mind. As for our music video, audiences are able to see the progression of red where nearing the end, this color can easily be identified showing how her rage has built over time. From the first scene in the bedroom we can see that she is still calm through the use of pink pajamas as she is still starting her day to the car ride passing her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend where her lips are slightly red colored to the next scene with Caylee wearing a red top with red lips as she lets go of her memories about her ex to finally the bathroom scene where it consists of red lighting, red water and red roses taking over the initial white-clear color to accentuate her feeling of anger.
The repetitiveness of the font “drunken hour” for the music video title, album title, booklet and social media posts is to represent the bits of memories Caylee remembers at her unorderly state of mind. Using black and white for most of the texts amplifies the audience to focus their attention on the color red and to show some feeling of emptiness in the midst of all this anger. In addition, adding the rose element as graphics and a prop with some pictures having her hold a perfect rose stem to having the petals all wilted in other photos symbolizes Caylee losing herself just as if this heartbreak causes a part of her to die with this relationship.
By thoroughly implementing these elements all throughout the media products, audiences can certainly connect everything together to show the common theme of heartbreak in which Caylee feels.
As I mentioned before with our target audience being between the ages of 15-25, since this breakup song regarding a toxic relationship is something that they can relate to, I decided to use Instagram as the main social media platform to raise awareness for our artist and media products. Especially with a majority of Instagram users being around the ages of 18-24, this platform can easily help us gain the right audience. Instagram also allows the audience to interact with the artist through joining their lives or liking, commenting and sharing their posts, stories and profiles. This constant engagement will boost the account, thus increasing the chance of the artist’s profile being recommended to similar audiences which in return will allow more people to know about the artist and gain more fans.
To increase awareness about our artist and the album, we decided to both follow and go against the conventions regarding the making of our music video, digipak and social media.
For our music video, I followed the conventions of making Caylee lip sync in some parts of the music video whilst cutting to other scenes showing visual shots instead. We also shot the music video in 4 different sets with 4 different looks using multiple camera shots and angles to film in different areas of each set while using the editing technique of cross cutting and cutaways to make the video more fun and entertaining for the audience. However, I challenged it by quickly repeating the same pictures for a few instrumental parts of the song to catch the audience‘s attention.
In regards to the digipak, I used the same format of a typical digipak by having the artist’s picture as the front cover, the name of the album, artist, a parental advisory label since the song contained some swear words, record label, barcode, copyright and song list. The CD also contained the album title and artist following the theme of red. However, I went against the convention by including a booklet which shows additional pictures of Caylee and some lyrics and credits to each song as well as photocards of her which are normally seen in Kpop albums.
As for the social media, we followed the norm of having the artist name, a bio relating to the song, links related to the artist (e.g music video, shop), a professional dashboard, highlights and a mix of aesthetically pleasing and informative posts such as the album cover, merch release, tour dates and photos of Caylee herself all with the same red concept. However, we broke the convention by only having 9 posts to centralize on the idea of the artist losing energy from being heartbroken which again is the main idea of our song.