“Wishing Well” is one of the moving songs from Juice WRLD’s first post-post album, Legends Never Die. The song, which mainly points to problems of addiction and intellectual aptitude, is an animated video clip full of images, such as ants and massive nebulae.
Former Juice WRLD managers have hired Jide Carolan, a 21-year-old London designer, to direct and animate the video. Carolan, or KDC Visions, has been a Juice fan for years, he said. However, he never had a chance to know the legend before he died.
“It’s a strange and sensitive scenario to be in and direct anything for someone who’s gone and never heard of,” Carolan said. “When I got the clue, I literally played it about 2 billion times, imagining exactly what I wanted.
His animation guided through the words of each line, he said.
Drugs are discussed “Wishing Well”, but Carolan felt they were a sensitive subject, especially since she did not know Juice personally. Instead, Carolan discovered other tactics to form lines that talk about drugs by using emojis and portraying a “story of him fighting or not knowing how to feel, what he says in the song.”
The combination of literal representations of original letters and twists makes it an engaging and moving video. Here are the stories some wonderful scenes and details.
The foreground includes a nebula that revolves around Juice’s signature “999” written in star powder. Carolan enclusioned the help of German visual effects artist Jann F. Reuter for this picture of the area, who was going to set the emotional tone of the video.
“[Reuter] can even combine some of the colors with the music, and I feel like smoke and debris can evoke feelings at times,” Carolan said.
When the speed slows down, the video moves away from Juice’s eye and introduces her character, whom Carolan has really dressed. “I paid special attention to your Instagram. She has an outfit where she wears tracksuit pants and Gucci shoes,” she said. “I designed it particularly that way.”
Then, in sync with the line, “I throw my pain with me in a wishing well,” the animated Juice WLRD catches a floating emoji around it and literally throws it into a wishing well.
In his first verse, Juice raps: “Ring ring, phone call of depression”. The corresponding scene is animated through this line, but with a twist. In the video, Juice literally speaks for a phone classified as “depression”, however, floats on a couch in a cloud of emojis floating in the same way.
“Since it speaks in an indescribable sense, I think it would be a mind-blowing, unrealistic, just crazy scene,” Carolan said. There’s a small but vital detail in this photo. “With the poster on the wall too, I looked for her to look alone enough to show that he was spending it in her own space.”
One of the most striking lines of the song in the chorus says, “Perky made me sting like an anthill.” When Carolan thought about how to show this in the video, she continued her theme of making literal representations of the lyrics, however, she noticed that this line in the anthills “probably one of the strangest, is the most misleading.”
“Those ants over there give that itchy feeling”ew, ew, ” he said, “which precisely reflects the feeling described in the letters. Also, because the ants in the clip are huge, they give a disgusting feeling.
In designing the anthills, Carolan said he encouraged them through termite mounds. This led him to design a kind of hybrid hill. He recalled films such as The Lion King “that made them very pretty,” and sought a similar effect, especially in the scene where emojis and flowers come out instead of ants.
In the most recent verse of “Wishing Well,” Juice WRLD discusses his drug-related quotes. At this point in the video, Juice notices a flower as he lies in his car. He gets up to scare him away.
“The flower is the only time I’ve sought to form drugs,” Carolan said. “I threw the flower at him like all he sees. It distracts him. Come in and leave it.”
In 2018, Juice WRLD and Future collaborated and released a mixtape, WRLD ON DRUGS. The canopy of Carolan’s lean flower.
As Juice raps the last verse of his last verse, “I stopped taking it and now the drug takes me,” the flower takes him to a soft glow in which he is dragged. This scene, Carolan said, shows Juice going to heaven and escaping his troubles.
“It’s the day. It’s no longer dark and in a sharp cut,” he said, referring to his new animated attire for what Juice wore at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards. “He’s not chasing anything. There are no emojis that torment him or anything like that.
Legends Never Die through Juice WRLD made history. This is the largest postustum debut album since Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. On this week’s Hot 100, five of the album’s songs are among the 10 most sensible. “Wishing Well” is lately at number 5.
I’m a journalist and poet born and raised in South Chicago. I like to write about music, especially hip hop, rap and R-B, and their intersections with other forms.
I’m a journalist and poet born and raised in the southern component of Chicago. I like to write about music, especially hip hop, rap and R-B, and its intersections with other entertainment bureaucracies, social disorders and broader images. I’m interested in the way things are talked about. As music continues to evolve over generations and businesses, understanding intersections is crucial. My paintings have been published in The Harvard Crimson, Chicago Magazine, Harvard Review of Latin America, PALABRITAS and more.