critical reflection planning

    Now that I got most of the major and minor tasks done, I want to actually sit down and properly plan this so that I can write it with more ease in a few days. For this part, we must answer four different questions that related to our project, so I'm going to kind of provide an outline for each question. 

How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

• researched Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Lizzy McAlpine, One Direction, Gracie Abrams, Niall Horan
• genre is pop, wanted to do a storytelling music video
• romantic narrative centered on youth culture
• challenged artist singing at camera
• theme of heartbreak
• close up shots for intimate or sentimental scenes

How do your products engage with the audience?

• target audience are teenagers and young adults (mostly female)
• very active on social media
• instagram is used commonly when following artists, easy engagement
• digipak: engaging inserts, signed lyrics/pictures is liked by many
• music video: relatable story, engaging video because story is easy to follow and it's not complicated
• criticism: target audience is divided by liking CD or vinyl more, there is no preference

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

• wanted to develop a brand that felt welcoming and relatable
• color scheme cohesive through social media presence, as well as in the digipak
• beach/sunset theme represented in music video as well as the symbol for freedom and finding yourself
• theme of being yourself and not depending on anyone for your happiness can be seen
• "welcome to my little world" reflects that album is her own thoughts and struggles that she's been through

How do your products represent social groups or issues?

• represents young teenage girl going through a breakup and trying to find themselves again
• I think we were successful in conveying that

These are the notes I took to be able to complete this part of the project in the best way I can. 

finally finished editing!

    I FINALLY FINISHED EDITING THE VIDEO!!!! The happiness that I feel knowing that this big part of the project is done is overwhelming. I'm genuinely so happy with how it came out. 

    I haven't blogged this week about editing but after our second filming day, which is when we got the majority of our clips, I put it all together and managed to get it mostly done in one day. 

    My favorite part so far is this part in the picture because I love the lighting and the part of the lyrics that it's on because its like at the end of the chorus when it slows down a little. For this part, I wanted to do a slow zoom out but I had forgotten howwww to do that post production. Sooooo once again, I went on YouTube to search for a tutorial and it was really easy and I managed to make the speed match the song and it turned out pretty good!

    The hardest part to edit was 100% the second part of the bridge where the pacing kinda speeds up because my first idea was to make it kind of an overlay with her driving to the beach and kinda flashbacks to before, but it looked off and idk there was something that didn't look right. So I talked to my partner and she gave me the idea of doing like a back and forth between them instead of overlaying them or just showing the driving scenes.

I'm really really happy with how it came out!

Adobe Made Simple. (2023, August 21). How To Add A SLOW ZOOM In Premiere Pro [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhbMKovtIbk

digipack

    This week, one of the things I was focused on a lot was developing the digipak. All the ideas that me and my partner had before got scratched because we weren't really vibing with it anymore tbh. 

    So we were kinda stuck on what we wanted because nothing was really calling to us. However, since we had a long weekend this week, I went to the beach just for fun and there was a beautiful sunset and I took a picture of it (as one does) and I looked at it and I got an idea that I could use it for the album!

    I just noticed that I kinda spoiled the album cover on my last blog that talked about social media but pretend you didn't see that! We always envisioned this album color scheme to be kind of orangey sunsety colors with some blue and this picture captured EXACTLY what we wanted for the cover. 

    So once I got home I immediately went on Canva and started playing around with the picture and fonts to see what looked best and I love how it came out. As for the back, I still wanted to do like the looped words for the tracklist but I had no clue how to do it. I tried to curve it but it never creates a loop, it only makes a circle. So I did what most people would do and I looked for a tutorial and YouTube and it was actually really easy to do and it came out exactly how I wanted it! (Something that I found to be a funny coincidence is that the font that I used for that was called something with Annie, and the name of the artist I'm working with is Annie). 

    Anyways here's how they came out! We still have to work on the inserts but we got the main thing out of the way. 

Master creative. (2025, April 25). Spiral Text Animated Using Canva (Easy&Simple) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55EngRV8RoU

last filming day

    Today was our last filming day! We filmed everything else we needed in under an hour. We just needed the first 10 seconds of the video and the bridge.

    Me and my partner has prepared props that we could use to show her kinda getting rid of everything that was related to her past relationships. My partner printed a bucket list and like festival pictures and I brought a box filled with random things that my boyfriend has gotten me such as cards or bracelets and I brought some pictures I had with my friends. 

    Filming this part of the video of her driving in the car was super fun because either me or my partner had to be hiding from the camera and we were having fun exploring different angles to film in the car and I have a feeling it's gonna look really good once I put it all together!

social mediaaaaa

    Today I wanted to focus strictly on social media because we havent done muchhh and we needed to have it done asappp. I wanted to do a make shift Instagram account and have it look as real as possible. 

    I thought this was gonna be hard to make it look real but I had the idea of taking a screenshot of an actual account and lowering the transparecny so I could add my own elements on top of it. After I finished making the overall look for it and getting it ready, we started putting in the actual posts and writing the captions for all of them. Here's what we've got so far, and I feel like it's looking really good and cohesive with the branding!

second filming day!

     Today was our second day of filming! The goal was to finish filming, and we almosttt did, but we had to cut it short because both me and my partner had to be somewhere at 5. We have only one outfit left to film and we're planning on doing it one of these days so that we can finalize filming. 

    Anyways, filming was honestly really fun. We did a lot of things that I would do in my free time and I was getting so excited throughout the whole process because since I'm the one recording, I was seeing how it was looking and I was putting it all together in my head. I also went a little outside of my comfort zone (we had to burn some cookies which made me really sad).

    We encountered a lot of challenges such as finding a way to build a makeshift recording booth and make it look like its by a struggling artist but not make it look as bad to the point where its just, well bad. We also got to a point where we realized that we had started filming some shots with the wrong outfit, which really annoyed me because it meant we had to re-film those parts and we were already short on time, but it worked out in the end and shooting those was much easier since we had already done it. 

    Here's a fun behind the scenes video of us getting ready to film a scene! We used a lamp that has many different colors so we could have like an orangey light on her (it's actually the same lamp that I used last year for my portfolio project as well).

CCR!

    If I'm being completely honest, when our teacher first introduced this project to us and told us that we also had a CCR this year, I panicked inside, because from everything I did for the portfolio project last year, THAT WAS MY LEASTTTT FAVORITE PART. I don't really know why. Maybe it was because the thought of editing yet another two videos apart from the film opening just stressed me out in the time I had left. BUT thankfully, this years different and I don't have to think of a creative non boring yet engaging way to reflect on my project. Anyways enough yapping let's get started. 

    This year, the CCR is basically just an essay, which I prefer because it really allows me to just like talk about what my thought process was in my voice without having to change anything. An essay that's 1,000 words honestly sounds pretty intimidating, but I loveeee to talk endlessly about things I like and am proud of (and so far I am really proud of this project), so I know the word count won't be a problem, or at least a big one. 

Here's what I have thought so far in terms of how I'm going to organize my essay:

• Introduction: theme of music video and overall idea
• Body Paragraphs: research (on other similar artists, their strategies and everything), audience engagement (how did we make sure our audiences would be engaged, making social media personal), branding (how did we create a sense of branding for the artist, and specifically, the music video), social groups (teenagers, relationships, small artists trying to make it big)
• Conclusion: quick wrap up offering closing statement

I still have a lot of planning to do for this, but my main priotiry right now is getting the video finalized.

me because this project is almost

over