CCR

Watching two men dressing in a biochemical suit, playing with condoms, and ending up killing each other… sounds absolutely chaotic even to me. The fact that our music video is just so weird that it could be a substantial cultural dish made for postmodern argument, which we designed to purposely aim audiences, interact with audiences, challenge the social conventions that the audience believes in, and eventually try to impact some of the audience’s view and believes.

Behind the eardrum pricing plot is our effort to create unique branding to target various audiences. How Louis performs psychopathically, considered inappropriate for violating social norms, sabotages the audience as we expected. Seeing two Asian men, one blowing condoms and assaulting others is designed to be humorous in the way that not only would a homosexual audience be interested, but also people who identified in any gender in any sexual orientation with their ages ranging from teenagers to mid age. However, this restrained our product from conservative or religious audiences who previously participated in our plan. The sexual hinting content will discourage parents from bringing their children to consume the product. The loss of possible audiences is not necessarily a fatal mistake but a sacrifice for further creativity.

One prominent theme apart from sexualization is violence. I came up with the initial idea by watching “The Killing Type” by Amanda Palmer. I was trying to create a similar copy but did not achieve the same visual impact due to the lack of budget and workforce. However, one of my friends’ feedback states, “It is kind of scary till the back.” The commentary justified that we accomplished the goal. How we implicitly present violence on the big screen allows more female audiences who are incapable of accepting violent scenes to appreciate it. Since we set our song, our branding has constantly changed, especially in violence. From blog 7, where we aim to create a sinister and bizarre atmosphere, our violence proportion got to cut back so much from the photography session till it became an ending of MV rather than the significant amount we planned. To fix the deficiency, I changed my Digipak to contain a fair amount of violent symbols at the back to prepare the audience for the sudden stylistic change, which many of them found hard to interpret in the rough-cut screening.

Behind all the elements of our branding is our ideology, which incorporates postmodern theories and challenges the traditional postmodern conventions in our production. Our primary inspiration was to reflect on Chomsky’s manufacturing consent theory, in which most people live under consent distributed by political class. The MV features a Utopian narrative that detachments a surreal world setting from reality consent where no meaning exists. Therefore, no concerns exist. The “Danny the Goat” plot implicitly narrates that Danny is a friend Louis imagined based on the goat. He loves Danny so much that he kills Danny to stay with him. The psychopathic behavior eventually ends up making Louis satisfied. By plotting this, we aim to challenge how the mass media traditionally functions to regulate and manipulate the audience’s behavior. This could potentially “change the point of view” of the audience as to what the lyrics were. Therefore, I referred to our product as “a substantial cultural dish made for postmodern argument.” The discussion is left open for people to interpret whether this reinforces their moral consent or frees people from restrictions that prevent them from judging or regulating themselves to what might not be correct.

Our branding also features a critical debate in the art area about fashion. We aim to reflect upon the phenomenon that the current fashion trend is driving too much toward industrialization and that art is losing its meaning of existence. Under the influence of “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore, we decided that costume would be a big part of it. We chose biochemical suits inspired by “crushxd” by Crumb, which I wrote in my blog, that the audience might find unfamiliar as they are often associated with danger. The actor has their weird clown-like makeup designed with complex strips and complex polygons in vibrant bass color. This symbolizes the anti-minimalism movement, contrasting with how the current industry loves minimalism. The branding is so much better than last year’s production, where we did not have any makeup but just purely incorporated bananas and messed around with blue humor.

But how we interact with audiences…is still down to blue humor, ironically starting with a small bag of Durex condoms that Danny bought, which he does not even know why. Chinese society usually reacts violently, resisting anything that links with sex to be shown on the big screen. That is how we find a breakthrough to sabotage our audiences by showing them the presence of sexual hints without any mental preparation. In the premiere, I was at the back and saw many students and teachers look terrifically embarrassed when Louis put the condom in his hand. This is a step toward challenging social issues, and it works efficiently. We also got some positive feedback from the audience. Our drama teacher said, “I was expecting Louis to blow the condom till it explode.” This ended up with us creating a mocked-up Instagram post saying, “Go and buy this condom.” which I did not even expect as a way of interacting with the audience at the start of the production. Maybe we should go back and film Louis blowing the condom till it explodes.

One abnormality in our branding is that many words in our production said “Lemon”: digipaks, blog posts, and our MV, but you rarely see the actual lemon (except for the front page of my website). The theme of conflict is our branding, from the clashing color pallet you would find on Louis and Danny to the genre opposition featured in the MV and how condoms can be linked with murder. Lemon acts only as a hook, which does not function in traditional packaging.

To sum up, I do feel like we have stepped further in challenging conventions and thinking deeper than in last year’s production. However, I have to say we were too ambitious to include so many ideologies in our product, which eventually did not present it as clearly as we expected.