Background Information: 

Suicidal by the renown artist YNW Melly (Jamell Maurice Demons) released the official music video November 22, 2019. This music video is unique and utilizes animation throughout the entirety. The animation and directing is credited to Tristan Zammit.

Review: 

The music video is beautifully made by Tristan Zammit and depicts the rapper, YNW Melly struggling with his last relationship and a battle between himself. Throughout the entirety of the video it becomes much more apparent to the viewers as to why he is such an unstable person. The animation style in the music video has a lot of hyper realistic characteristics. YNW Melly’s movement is very realistic almost as if it was copied frame by frame. On the other hand, the animation style changes the further the video goes on and it depicts some cartoon style characters.The way the animator colored the project is very colorful and saturated. Around the finale of the video the tone of the video becomes much more dire and darker, so the animation style becomes much more rigid and hectic. The line art is not defined and becomes less polished. 

Analysis: 

There is a lot of symbolization throughout the music video and it may be hard to catch them on the first viewing, so I’ll let you in on them. In the opening of the video we see a shot panning out slowly revealing YNW Melly’s feet on the edge of a building, then we see the artist sitting on the edge of the building singing the song with a distressing look on his face. This scene is supposed to imply Melly is contemplating death due to her. Around 24-seconds into the video we see a noose tied in the shape of a heart, implying that the relationship is a love-hate thing. Even though he was cheated on by her, he still loves her in some sense. Around 30-seconds into the video we see a shot of Melly being strangled by a snake. The snake throughout the video is supposed to represent his ex-girlfriend. In addition, snakes represent deceitfulness, which is what Melly is trying to imply his girlfriend is. Around 51-seconds into the video we see a shot of Melly reaching for his ex-girlfriend’s hand, but instead of grabbing her hand he goes for the bottle of Hennessy. This one is pretty straightforward, but it is supposed to explain what form of coping mechanism Melly resorted to in order to forget her and the relationship. Once he drinks it, we enter his subconscious and it showcases how hectic things are as he battles what was and his personal demons. Around 1:10 in the video, we hear Melly say, “baby you took control of me” and what is depicted is a dozen arms controlling/restraining him. This is also another straightforward one to understand, the arms are supposed to represent that the ex-girlfriend was very controlling during their relationship and he had no say throughout it. Around 1:44 in the video, we see the snake wrapping itself around the bottle of hennessy. This one is open for interpretation, but I believe this depiction is supposed to represent what the relationship was to Melly. A maliciously untrustworthy person (snake) and drinking his problems away. It becomes very apparent that it is because around 2:29 in the video, we see the snake’s bones entering the bottle of hennessy and Melly drinking it. Throughout the video we see at various points that the animation style switches. These switch ups in animation are supposed to represent Melly’s instability and lack of ability to control his emotions. As the video progresses and we see the switches in animation it becomes more and more hectic. Essentially, showing us that it is an ongoing issue and it’s getting worse.   

In 2287, the Great War was a global thermonuclear war caused by the Sino-American War. It resulted in the destruction of all participating nations and abroad, global disruption of climate and billions of casualties as a result of nuclear blasts, exposure to radiation and subsequent collapse of social and government structures. Mankind was set back several hundred years in the span of just two hours

Max Hawkins wanted to avoid being apart of a linear algorithm, so he constructed an application that picks a random location in your city along with an Uber driver that takes you to a place you don’t know. He found the experience exhilarating because he found himself going to places he would never imagine going. He also added many more random generators such as a youtube generator, schedule generator, diet generator, tattoo generator, Spotify generator, FaceBook events, etc. He let the computer decide where he lived at and he would live there for a time spend of approximately two to three months. Weirdly giving the machine complete control of his life was the most free and liberating he felt.

There are many weird things that the application can be used for. One of those weird things that I found it was using custom pictures or designs for bakery. Specifically, utilizing them on cakes. Another odd thing some people utilize photoshop for is for some form of UI design for things on devices. I personally find it very crazy that one program is responsible for so much. Another obscure thing that comes to mind would be people designing art pieces in order to be tattooed on themselves. I feel like traditionally people just go for the sketch book route, but I’m more than certain that people utilize the program for this aspect.

I do not have any opinions about this years Super Bowl. I was aware that it aired this Sunday, but I was too busy to watch it due to various responsibilities in my life. I didn’t even know which teams were facing each other this year. I don’t enjoy football as much as everyone else. I prefer baseball.

I personally believe that this video by the Atlantic shows us how problematic deep fakes can be, but I don’t think that it is as catastrophic as they insinuated throughout the video. I feel that “we” as a society are aware of deep fakes and the technology behind it, so it isn’t completely convincing to us since we can pin point somethings that are very OFF. I.E. glossy, blurry or reflective face, face is not alligned correctly to body, audio is not synced, etc. I only see it becoming an issue if videos like a president saying something completely deranged or threatening circulating to a country that is not familiar with the technology and accepts it at face value. If we educate people about this technology then it won’t be as problematic as this video is indicating.

I do no understand the purpose of this video. It seems very nonsensical and makes no sense. I guess it’s fun to say random things in a funny voice, but there is nothing to obtain from watching this video. If you find it entertaining for what ever reason, that’s okay, but I would be interested as to why you would find this video entertaining. I’m not sure if this video is meant to be considered “art”, but I don’t think it IS art. But, I’m not in the position to say that.