“Wishing Well” is one of the emotional songs from Juice WRLD’s No. 1 debuting, posthumous album Legends Never Die. The song—which details struggling with mental health and addiction—has an animated music video packed with visuals, like huge ants and nebulas.
Juice WRLD’s former managers recruited Jide Carolan, a 21-year-old creative from London, to direct and animate the video. Carolan, or KDC Visions, has been a fan of Juice for years, he said. However, he never got the chance to meet the legend before he passed away.
“It’s a weird, kind of awkward situation to be in control and direct something for somebody that’s no longer there that you never knew,” Carolan said. “When I got the track, I literally just replayed it about 2,000 billion times, just picturing what I wanted.”
His animation was guided by the words of every line, he said.
Drugs are mentioned throughout “Wishing Well,” but Carolan felt they were a sensitive topic, especially since he didn’t know Juice personally. Instead, Carolan found other ways to portray lines talking about drugs by using emojis and painting a “story about him battling himself or not knowing how to feel, which is what he says in the song.”
The mix of literal representations of lyrics and quirky twists make for an interesting and emotional video. Here are the stories behind some big scenes and details.
The First Scenes
The first shot includes a nebula that circles around to Juice’s signature “999” written in stardust. Carolan recruited the help of German visual effects artist Jann F. Reuter for this outer space shot, which was crucial to setting the emotional tone of the video.
“[Reuter] can even match some of the colors with the music, and I just feel like that smoke and those particles can really evoke emotion sometimes,” Carolan said.
When the beat drops, the video zooms out from Juice’s eye and introduces his character, which Carolan dressed based on real life. “I paid close attention to his Instagram. He has an outfit on there where he actually wears Gucci sweatpants and those Gucci shoes,” he said. “I styled him specifically in that way.”
Then, in sync with the line, “I toss my pain with my wishes in a wishing well,” the animated Juice WLRD grabs an emoji floating around him and, literally, tosses it in a wishing well.
Floating Phone Calls
In his first verse, Juice raps, “Ring ring, phone call from depression.” The corresponding scene is inspired by this line, but with a twist. In the video, Juice is literally talking on a phone labeled “depression,” but he’s floating off a couch in a cloud of similarly floating emojis.
“Since he’s talking in a not-literal sense, I thought would make it a trippy, unrealistic, just crazy scene,” Carolan said. There’s a small but important detail in this shot. “With the poster on the wall as well, I wanted it to look quite lonely to portray that he’s going through it in his own space.”
Termite-Inspired Anthill
One of the song’s most striking lines from the chorus says, “Perky got me itching like a anthill.” When Carolan was thinking of how to show this in the video, he continued with his theme of doing literal representations of lyrics, but he noted this line about anthills “was probably one of the weird it’s the trickiest ones.”
“Those ants in there give that, ‘ew, ew’ itchy feeling,” he said, which exactly mirrors the feeling the lyrics describe. Plus, because the ants in the music video are huge, they give an especially icky feeling.
When designing the anthills, Carolan said he was inspired by termite hills. This led him to designing a sort of hybrid hill. He recalled movies like Lion King “that made them look quite beautiful,” and he wanted a similar effect, especially in the scene where emojis and flowers come out instead of ants.
Pink Flower & Paradise
In the last verse of “Wishing Well,” Juice WRLD digs into his relationship with drugs. At this point in the video, Juice notices a pink flower while lying down in his car. He gets up to chase it.
“The flower is the only time I wanted to represent drugs,” Carolan said. “I threw in the flower as something he sees. It distracts him. He goes for it, and it’s leaving him.”
In 2018, Juice WRLD and Future collaborated and dropped a mixtape, WRLD ON DRUGS. The cover art inspired Carolan’s lean-colored flower.
As Juice raps the last line of his final verse, “I stopped taking the drugs and now the drugs take me,” the flower leads him to a bright light that he is pulled into. This scene, Carolan said, represents Juice going to paradise and escaping his problems.
“It’s daytime. It’s no longer nighttime, and he’s in a crispy fit,” he said, referring to his new outfit that’s inspired by what Juice wore to the 2019 Billboard Music Awards. “He’s not chasing anything. There aren’t emojis tormenting him or anything.”
Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die is making history. It’s the biggest posthumous album debut since Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. On this week’s Hot 100, five of the album’s songs are in the top 10. “Wishing Well” is currently ranked No. 5.
