Final Promotional Package

 Below is the final promotional package for our music video project.

Music Video:

Here is the link to the music video in case the embedded one doesn't work

Digipak:

Front Cover

Inside/Content

Back Cover

Final Critical Reflection

 Below is the critical self-reflection that I have written.

Our music video and digipak follow a lot of indie-pop conventions where our theme is about friendship and the emotions that come with separation, especially around graduation. Friendship and separation is a common theme in indie music videos. Moreover, we followed indie-pop music video conventions by using handheld camera movements, natural settings to make the scenes feel more relatable, as well as used props such as matching bracelets to highlight the emotional connection between the two artists.

However, we also challenge conventions to make our video stand out as according to the Genre Theory by Steve Neale, which states that a media product must be similar enough to fit into a genre but different enough to stand out from other media products. Instead of the smooth, professional shots seen in mainstream pop videos, we used handheld, shaky camera work to create a more personal feel to it, as if the audiences are experiencing the events with the characters. Moreover, we used casual everyday outfits, rather than the styled and fancy looks often seen in music videos. Another convention we subverted was the balance of screen time between the main artist and the featured performer. While our main artist (Jasmine) still appears slightly more than the featured artist (Viola), the difference isn’t huge, shifting the focus from just the singer to their friendship as a whole. We chose to subvert the convention of having lyrics/thank-you notes on the inside of the digipak because we wanted the design to focus more on emotions and themes of the video rather than distracting the audiences with extra text. Additionally, we used two female characters in our video, which challenges the usual trend of male-dominated music videos.

The representations we portrayed in our product are female teenagers and young adults, primarily aged 17-22. Our theme centers around friendship, a universal topic that resonates with many people in this age group, particularly when it comes to the separation caused by graduation. Since we’re filming in an Indonesian school setting, our primary target audience will be high school students in Indonesia. Furthermore, it’s important to note that our representation of females is emphasized, as both the actresses are female, and the tone and atmosphere of the scenes that we’re planning to create are designed to reflect how the world is experienced from a female perspective.

According to the End of Audience Theory by Clay Shirky, audiences demand interactive media products; if it isn’t interactive, they will reject it. Therefore, me and my teammates have made multiple strategies in which it may help to increase audience engagement. One of these strategies is to put a link tree in the artist (Jasmines)’s social media platform bio, where her fans and audiences are able to simply click on the link, which redirects them to a link tree that gives them access to the artist’s Spotify playlist, as well as lyric sheets for her songs. This way, audiences can actively engage with our artist’s music video instead of just watching the video. By providing access to her Spotify playlist, audiences can stream her songs more easily, therefore leading to an increase in her audience. Additionally, the lyric sheets allow the audience to sing along and analyze the song’s meaning in detail, which can create a deeper bond between the audience and the artist. 

The way in which we will be distributing our product is by giving it out both online and offline. In one of the links in the link tree mentioned earlier, the audience can be led to a website where they can purchase the artist’s digipak. The digipak can also be bought through online retailers such as Amazon, Shopee (a local online shop), and Etsy. Additionally, the music video will be posted on YouTube to obtain a wide reach of audience. This online distribution allows us to maximise accessibility and engagement, ensuring that our artist is able to reach both local and international audiences. Furthermore, it’s a very simple and efficient way to obtain our product, therefore audiences can purchase the digipak or watch the music video almost anywhere as they only need an electronice (e.g. handphone). However, we would also like to distribute our product offline like in local music outlets as online distribution often relies on algorithms. Therefore, a good way to reach new audiences who may not have the algorithm that will lead them to our product online is to distribute it in stores.

In this project, I was mainly responsible for the digipak and storyboard. Creating a storyboard in Ibispaint X (a drawing app) has helped me learn how to translate a song’s emotions and theme into a visual representation. Moreover, it has also improved my illustration skills to portray compositions, camera angles, and mise-en-scenes. For digipak, I used IbispaintX and Canva where I learned more about graphic design skills. Moreover, developing a digipak has guided me to a better understanding of layout, color theory, as well as typography which I had to align to the music video’s aesthetic and the artist’s overall branding. One way in which I did this was by including pastel (mostly pink) colors into the digipak as the music video mainly consisted of bright color schemes and the artist (Jasmine)’s persona is an extroverted teenage singer with a soft aesthetic and cheerful personality. In the music video, Jasmine can often be seen wearing soft colored feminine clothes in the music video, which effectively conveys her personal branding, being the friendly, cheerful, and soft girl. 

The research I’ve done on digipak helped to create a significantly better digipak than what I’ve imagined. The digipak I made has a grainy texture and has pastel colors, as well as mixed media, which is exactly aligned to my research. The grainy texture as well as messy and colorful illustrations are aimed to create a sense of nostalgia within the audience as the theme for our product is the bittersweet feeling of separation of friendships around graduation. The back cover of the album is according to the research I’ve done where it is simple enough to not take attention away from the tracklist but not too simple that it looks bland. 

Here is the link to the google document which I wrote this on, in case the text on this blog is formatted oddly. 

Audience Feedback

This is the audience feedback blog post that Beatrice has written. However, I was the one who made the Google Forms and we all equally contributed in thinking of questions to put in it.

 The purpose of this screen test is to gain audience feedback about our work and see if there are any improvements that can be made. We decided to use Google Forms to create a survey to share with our audience because we find it convenient and easy to use. We divided the Google Forms into two. The first form is for our music video, while the second form is for our social media and digipak.

Here is the link to the Google Form incase of any technical difficulties → Music Video , Social Media & Digipak

Here are our questions that we made as a team : 

Music Video 

Social Media

Digipak

For the music video, we chose these questions because we want to make sure that our music video effectively resonates with our target audience (teenagers and young adults), and accurately represents the theme of graduating from high school. We also want to assess how well the artist’s persona come across in the music video. For the social media, we want to determine the level of engagement that our target audience prefer, such as whether "fans" want direct interactions or a more curated presence of the star. As for the digipak, we want to make sure that the album cover appeals visually to our target audience and aligns with their aesthetic preferences. Hence, we included images of the digipak's sketch. Overall, we want to make sure that our social media strategy and digipak design align with our target audience’s preferences.

We included members of our target demographic in the screen test to ensure that the feedback we receive is appropriate. Finding people for the screen test was a little difficult because we were told to ask for feedbacks from people who are not taking media studies, which made it quite difficult to find some people who were willingly to respond and able to provide meaningful feedback, as we wanted to ensure that the responses were collected in an appropriate and constructive manner.

Here are the drafts that we showed audiences for the screen test:

MV Draft Link (Music Video Draft)

(Digipak Sketch by Jasmine)

Here are the results from the audience feedback:

Music Video

Social Media 

Digipak 

From the feedback we learned that while most aspects were well-received, there are still areas that need improvement, particularly in the music video. According to Steve Neale's Genre theory, a media text must conform to the conventions enough to be recognizable, yet subvert enough to be different and interesting. However, after reviewing the feedback, we realized that our music video largely adheres to conventions without challenging them, which made it feel monotonous or less engaging for our target audience. Despite this, the responses suggest that we were successful in representing the star’s persona, as the three words used to describe them aligned with our intended portrayal. Furthermore, we gained insights into how to refine the social media and digipak to better appeal to our target audience, and what elements we need to include in it.

While we can't really incorporate certain suggested elements from the responses (such as graduation caps, gowns, or younger actresses resembling our stars) due to accessibility constraints, the audience feedback remains invaluable in refining our music video. Specifically, we can still use the feedback to improve some areas, such as enhancing the authenticity of performance, ensuring that the lip-syncing and acting feel more natural, and adding more emotional scenes to strengthen the narrative reinforcing the idea that "the stars are graduating and truly leaving this time." This adjustment not only enhances audience relatability but also prevents the video from feeling visually repetitive and monotone, as it adds emotional depth. The screen test has been an important part of our production process, because it allows us to identify areas for improvement and gain insight into what resonates with our target demographic. By implementing these suggestions, we can create a more engaging and compelling final product. 

Reflection:

When making the google form, I faced some difficulties such as having some questions doubled and some disappear. I tackled this problem by arranging all the questions carefully, organizing them, and rechecking before sending the form to potential audiences. Beatrice has successfully explained the audience feedback and how it can help us improve our products. I believe that by taking this audience feedback, we are able to shape our products into the way customers want it, therefore increasing their satisfaction. This may further lead to an increase in customer loyalty as well as profit and revenue. Next time, I do think that we should send the form to more people to get a better average than just around 10 people, making the data more generalizable and valid.

Editing

 This post was written by Jasmine, and it details some of the decisions I had to make while editing! 

Editing and post production:

Filming Hardware:

I decided to film the music video entirely using my Fujifilm Xt30ii camera as that would give us the best quality of video, also making it more cinematic. However, one of the biggest issues was that I had to be there all the time as the camera was mine and every time we filmed, I had to be there and bringing the equipment to school was also very heavy and was a bit hassling when some of my teammates would cancel the filming session suddenly. My battery would also run out quite quickly, which is why I initially bought a spare battery, however, I got scammed and the battery did not work when it arrived to me. It also took a long time to export the pictures and videos to my iPad at times. In hindsight, it might’ve been easier to record using our phones instead.

Editing Software:

To begin with, I decided to use DaVinci Resolve as my editing program as I had heard many good reviews about it, being new to the editing scene! I had also learned that this program had a clip-stabilizing feature which was what I really needed since at some points of the filming process, I didn’t use a tripod which meant that most of my clips were shaky to some degree, the stabilizer would help me with that issue. I had also heard that it was more user friendly compared to some of the other famous editing softwares such as Adobe. In addition, it was actually my second choice as I had initially planned to use CapCut, however, referencing my Multicam media mini-project, that software was very laggy and impacted the final product, therefore, to avoid that I decided to choose a different software. I had also researched and saw that DaVinci’s color grading feature was also top-notch and most of its tools were available for free, which is just what I needed for this project!

Editing Hardware:

I decided to use my iPad Pro (12.9-inch) (6th generation)! The reason why I decided to use this hardware instead of my laptop was dependent on some factors. The first factor was that the clips from all the filming we did were exported to my iPad via the Fujifilm app, therefore, it would be easiest to edit on my iPad since I wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of exporting the clips a second time to my laptop. Secondly, I use my iPad on a day-to-day basis and it is very easily transportable. Therefore, it would give me as much access to video editing as possible every day, and it would be quick to check on my progress on editing often for my fellow teammates. I was also able to bring my iPad to most of the filming sessions, which meant that I could work on the editing right after we finished filming, making it more efficient.

Post-production:

Here is the overall interface and timeline of our music video in DaVinci Resolve.

Initially, I did have a bunch of issues while using the software since I was a complete beginner at using it. One of the main issues was that when I was adjusting the length of the clips in the program, it kept on deleting or readjusting the duration of other clips, which confused me a lot because I didn’t understand why it was happening. At many points during editing, I had to keep readjusting the clips to the song again and again because I kept making this mistake. Eventually, I learned from my mistakes and made sure to look at the mini-timeline on top of the main timeline to make sure that I was only adjusting one clip. This is the mini-timeline I’m referring to: 

As you can see, I didn’t use anything special like markers because I didn’t know they existed until the end of the project, so it was a bit too late to implement them. I did wish I’d used them earlier because I did have a hard time matching the cuts and clips to the beat of the song. I also wasn’t able to use a clapperboard because we didn’t have one, in addition I was acting so I forgot to clap to signify the start of the lipsync since I was so focused on trying to act for the music video, so I did also make a bunch of mistakes which did make it harder for me to edit, and I think it did take longer to edit than I thought it would. 

Significant editing tools, skills and processes during post-production:

Fade-in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzvNlGXXX5c

I used this video as a tutorial on how to add a fade-in edit to the start of my music video, which my media teacher suggested as in the indie pop genre, fade-ins are very common for the start of a music video. It also eases into the video, so the audience isn’t immediately shocked by the contents of the video.

This is what the timeline looked like once I added the transition, fade-in effect to my video clip. It was very easy to do so I’m glad!

Clip Stabilizing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1WG5jc5SU0

I used the video tutorial above to learn how to stabilize a video in DaVinci Resolve. I only found out about this feature halfway through making the music video. Previously, I had always brought my super heavy tripod, making it a hassle. Using this tool removed that issue as I wouldn’t need a tripod for every scene since I could just stabilize it in post-production while recording the scenes hand-held. One issue with stabilising a clip, though, was that it would make the clips more zoomed in as the software had to compensate for stabilizing the movement by shaking the video the opposite way to reduce the movement. It is a bit complicated to explain, but you can see the effect in these two images:

The first image is before stabilizing the video, and the second is after stabilizing, in addition to the pull-out edit that I will also talk about in this post.

Pull-out:

For the pull-out, I actually learned how to do it after playing around with the software a bit. All I had to do was click this button:

Which would pull out the tools view:

Then I selected the icon highlighted above. After doing so, a smaller green box would appear on top of the video clip.

All I had to do was make the green box smaller by dragging the edges inside, which resulted in the pull-out effect shown often throughout the video.

However, there were quite a few issues I encountered while trying to use this effect. The first one being that sometimes, the pull-out would make the clip super zoomed in at the start so that sometimes, parts of the artists body were cut off, therefore I had to often adjust the intensity of the effect to avoid this issue. In addition, sometimes the pull-out effect was way too quick which made it unnatural looking so I also had to adjust that often to make sure that the music video felt “real”.

I think that utilizing the pull-out often throughout the music video helped to convey towards the audience, connoting the separation between the two friends, eventually leading to both Jasmine and Viola studying in different countries. The pull-out effect takes the audience further away from the artists in the music video, conveying the same emotions stated earlier.

Color-grading:

I had initially planned to color grade very professionally using all the tools available in DaVinci Resolve, however due to the nature of our filming being done only so close to the deadline, I was unable to do that and ended up only simply colorgrading a small part of the music video to adjust the lighting or the mood of the scene by tweaking some of the colors. 

This is an example of one of the clips I color graded, the left before the colorgrading and the right, after. Although just a slight tweak, I made the scene more cool-toned to contrast the warm tone of the previous scene, a match cut to this one to symbolize that a fight was occurring between the two characters, Jasmine and Viola. This symbolic code (Barthes) would help to give the audience context to the fight occurring as blue or cool toned scenes are often associated with sadness, or unfortunate events while warm tones in the scene earlier would symbolize happiness and love (Binary opposites by Levi Strauss, in this case being happiness vs. sadness). Here is the clip, with warm lighting before this scene to show the contrast between the coloring. 

Additionally, for some scenes, the lighting was way too dark, so the audience wouldn’t be able to see what was happening on screen. Here is an example of what I did to fix that issue:

The first image is before the edits, and the second is after the lighting edits. I increased the exposure of the dark setting, making the dark areas of the video brighter. However, in doing so, I made the grain and the bad video quality very noticeable. Even though I already used a ring light, it was still very dark so the clip came out to be very bad quality, which means we will need to record the scene again. Reflection:

Since Jasmine effectively explained the edits she did, I'm able to capture some knowledge regarding color grading, as well as other concepts. These concepts have helped her to enhance the overall quality of the music video, creating a product that conveys our message effectively and correctly. I believe that the skills I've learned when reading this blog post of hers can come in handy in the future.