Comp 3 - Critical Self Reflection

 This post contains my critical self reflection

Word count : 1013 words

This year, of the three options we were given, I decided to undertake the third option, which is music video. I feel that music videos interests me the most and the fact that we are not just making a music video, but also its supporting features like a digipak and social media page, will make this project more exciting. I decided to make a music video for The Weeknd’s RnB, Hip-Hop song, Out of Time. I believe this song perfectly reflects our teenage years, the fact that we barely have time until we develop into adults.

Having been in two major video projects before, we dived into this project thinking we knew what we were doing, and realising later that we were so wrong.  We made the rookie mistake of brainstorming and collecting many different ideas, but did not think of how it would be implemented in our music video. The fact that we had a long semester break did not help as we were all separated. However, we gathered together and decided that we wanted a music video that represents us, teenagers. They are mostly main casts in romantic media texts, and stereotypically shown as a heterosexual couple. We thought that we would conform to those stereotypes in making our music video. With the help of technology such as google and the AI software, ChatGPT, we gathered ideas for artist names, album names, etc, and compiled them on a shared google docs document. Looking back, I'm very glad we decided to utilise these technologies as it greatly improved our efficiency and saved plenty of time. Being the main director, I created a script and worked alongside the main storyboarder, Niki, in creating the storyboard. To relieve Niki of some work as he had other responsibilities, I took the initiative to help create the storyboard. Based on our previous experience in storyboarding, making a detailed one is not of utmost importance as we only need the general idea of the shot. However, since we now split split the storyboard task employing two people, we have more time to work on improving the storyboard to make it look better and thus easing our filming process. I gathered several of my good friends who are gifted in art to teach me and Niki several skills and techniques in making good sketches. I learnt that shading and adding perspective grids greatly help in making the shooting process smoother, faster, and easier (see figure 1). The locations we’ve picked have all been scouted and deemed suitable to film in. However, we ditched several locations in favour of others due to convenience, as some are too fart away, which would waste our time and energy. We contacted a friend who owns cameras and other equipments necessary such as tripods, gimbals, and lightbars, which will make the music video more professional and expands the possibilities we could do by, for example, having unique colours like the purple colour scheme we use throughout the music video which otherwise would not be possible without lightbars.

I was appointed early on as the video editor. Initially, I thought this would not be a problem as I have been editor for previous projects, however for this particular project, I was lacking many of the editing skills required. Despite having used the Premiere Pro software for years, Through the help of YouTube, I managed to self teach many editing skills (see figure 2 and 3). After every shooting, I made sure to gather the clips as soon as possible so I can at the very least paste the raw footage into the editing software I use, which will make editing a lot easier and smoother in the future. This serves multiple purposes, as I’ve learnt from previous experience, by allowing me to quickly identify missing clips that I need, which is crucial early on as to not waste time in the future. From the research of music videos of the same genre and similar style, I try to conform to the editing styles by implementing the same style of editing into this music video. This includes changing the colour of some scenes, making it darker; implementing blur effects to dramatise scenes; and many more. After every edit, I always export a version of it and show it to not only my fellow teammates, but also my friends to see if there are changes that should be made. This proved very useful as the current, better version of the music video looks nothing like the original, first version I made.

Social media is a very powerful tool to advertise your artist, and therefore we take it with utmost importance. By first identifying the artist’s personality and its audience demographics and psychographics, we were able to start planning what the posts will look like. Our artist has a softboy, indie look, therefore, in the posts, he is shown wearing baggy clothing and performing ‘cute’ activities like feeding fishes. Basing our social media posts on Richard Dyer’s five things that make artists appealing in his Theory of Fandom. We implement his ideas by making posts showing his ordinary side (him feeding fishes), his consumption side (at an expensive house on an expensive chair), and success. From our research, popular artists of the same genre tend to have very simple captions that may or may not have any correlation to the post, and we decided to implement the same caption ideas. To further promote our music video, we released a short trailer. To attract attention in the trailer, we made it especially suspenseful by adding a clock-ticking audio effect and the clips momentarily going black. This is done in hopes of keeping audiences engaged. Another way to keep audiences engaged is by adding a linktree containing links to other social media. Although no longer trending in this day and age, we still are making a digipak and decided to keep it simple, conforming to out artist’s soft image. It is equipped with a tracklist and QR code to allow audiences to access websites and other social media sites.

Images

Figure 2. Learning how to make smoother speeding

Figure 3. Implementing the speed  up edit