COMP 3: Critical Self Reflection

This blogpost contains my critical self-reflection for Component 3, written by Timo. 

In this essay, I will be looking more closely into the pre-production, production, and post-production process of the creation of our component 3 where we, as a group of 4, were tasked to create a music video, as well as a promotional package, including a digipak and a social media page. 

In order to accurately target the correct audience we had to consider various factors during the process of our pre-production, we had to choose a song along with its genre, and with this, we decided to choose a song titled “Feather” by Sabrina Carpenter, an upbeat pop song that talks about a post-breakup life, where after cutting ties, she feels much lighter and freer without her ex-lover. This can be seen as a current social issue that we want to shine a light on with our project, as society nowadays faces issues where they are attached to past lovers and develop problematic obsessive issues. We wanted to focus on specific social groups, such as teenage girls and Asians, which we can enforce by using the proper representations in our music video. This was done by using an entirely Asian cast, as our lead actors are of the same social group as the demographic we are targeting, it allows the audience to empathize more with the actors as they feel represented, another aim is to raise awareness and popularize the representation of Asians in the media industry. With this we decided on a general theme and mood both our music video and promotional package will follow, we chose a more bright and fun theme creating a lighthearted mood. After conducting research, we decided that a performance-based music video would be more suitable for our project as we want to show the actor’s expression and emotion through the enjoyment of music. Furthermore, our digipak research helped us develop the right typeface and layout, deciding that a handwritten typeface would be more suitable as it will seem more personal, this will allow for the audience to feel a connection with the artist.

During the process of production of our music video and promotional package, there are plenty of things that we considered to further improve our project. In our music video, there are various uses of media language that emphasize the different stereotypes, mainly stereotypes of girlhood and players or womanizers. The mise-en-scene we used played a big role in the portrayal of our male lead, who represented a player, we did this by using the proper costume design, as we conformed to general conventions of womanizers, dressing them up in leather jackets, chains, and gelled hair. Furthermore, our male lead was carrying a bouquet of red roses which connotes love, this helps the audience understand the intent of the male lead. Additionally, we also conformed to stereotypes of girlhood, where we used props that were generally beauty products, such as makeup, straighteners, and hair dryers to depict scenes of them getting ready. On the other hand, the use of camera angles proved to be very useful in portraying representations in the project, the most prominent camera angles used in the music video were close-ups and wide angles; the use of close-ups makes the audience feel more connected with the media as they can analyze their expressions, whereas, wide angles were used to connote freedom to further emphasize the representations of girlhood. The actors’ performance was vital in setting the right tone which is why while directing this music video I always emphasized happiness and energy. All of these aspects of mise-en-scene create the perfect representation of what we want to portray in the music video. As both the writing and directing were done by men, this video could also be said to be produced through the male gaze and it in fact does follow conventions of this, where our video uses slow motion of the girls and close-ups of their features. With our social media page, we created posts that would engage with the audience, according to Richard Dyer’s theory of stardom, an audience engages with an artist’s ordinariness and consumption, with this we created an interview video of our star KIARA enjoying regular, everyday tasks such as drinking a matcha latte to post on our social media. We created this post whilst still following the theme and mood of our product, using bright colours, an open location with a scenic view. Consistently using and following the right theme and mood across all our products creates a sense of branding, this allows for the audience to feel a sense of loyalty and familiarity, which keeps the audience engaged. All the images used for the digipak were all taken in the set of our shoot, this can give the audience a more immersive experience, giving them a deeper look into our artist’s world. All of her posts on social media paint her as the perfect radiant girl, which is exactly how we imagined KIARA from the start.

Seeing that the process of pre-production and production can create a large impact on our product, I realized that it can be further enhanced through post-production. After getting all the necessary shots needed for our music video, editing played a big role in targeting the correct audience. Firstly, shooting at outdoor locations resulted in a variety of different lighting conditions, and color grading, provided consistency throughout the whole video; color grading improves the product visually to make it seem more appealing. Secondly, we used a few different cut techniques, which include, jump cuts, and punch-in cuts. Jump cuts were used to show a long action in a short amount of time, this seemed to be a running issue in this project because the song is quite short, whereas, punch-in cuts were used to direct the audience’s attention toward a certain action, as this is a performance-based music video, putting emphasis on their expressions and dance moves can help the audience understand our product with ease. Lastly, slow motion editing was arguably the most used in this product, this is because slow motion makes an ordinary task seem more graceful, it can be directly correlated to the lyrics, “lighter like a feather”, the slow motion video makes the audience feel lighter because of the surreal and dreamlike effect it creates. Our social media engages with the intended audience through various different methods. Nowadays, songs become famous overnight because of dance trends, seeing this we made a dance challenge that the audience could keep up with, whilst promoting the song. Furthermore, we included direct artist-to-audience interaction, such as replying to fans’ comments and hosting Q&A sessions.