FInal Promotional Package

This blogpost will include our final Promotional package which included the final digipak design, our social media, and our final music video. 

This will be our final music video link:

https://youtu.be/6HFxBQJhCP0?si=IFDYFFp4M1O1T_vm 

Incase our upload got copyrighted this is the link to our video in gdrive:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10lppbeXYoiGXN31z5dHiHjD9YG6zH-j4/view?usp=sharing 

The first product would be our digipak, which includes the album cover, the back side which also includes the tracklist, the inside design, and the backside.

                                                                                Cover 

       Back

                          Inside and CD

This will show our social media for our star Do0d:

Link to social media: https://www.instagram.com/do0d_official/ 

These are examples of how fans interact (through comments and likes) with our social media. It's not

much, but we can see their anticipation of the upcoming album release. 

This is another example that shows fans engaging with our content

Final Critical Self-Reflection

This blogpost will include my final CCR for the component 3 project Music Video

Our project for component 3 requires us to recreate any music video from a maximum of 5 years ago using our ideas to either subvert the conventions, conform the conventions or both. My team and I chose to recreate a song from the Indie genre that is well known to the global audience, ‘Here With Me’ by the singer D4vd. The jist of Indie is low-budgeted, minimalist, and mellow music made for those who enjoy slow and romantic tunes. One of the indie genre’s conventions is that it usually includes a romantic story in its music video whether in a good or bad relationship, in an Indie music video there will always be a love story being featured in the music video. Using ‘Here With Me’ as an example. In the music video, a man and a woman are shown in a romantic relationship but are having difficulty maintaining what they love the most. The song shows what it's like to be in a relationship, revealing the ups and downs of love and making the audience realise that in relationships, expectations should always be kept low. Our music video will represent the hardships of trying to maintain a serious relationship and how much effect love can have on an individual. The way we represent this dominant reading is by having a male Indonesian student who is deeply in love with his girlfriend and is committing to the relationship at such a young age. This sense of imagery will be done by having an up-and-down situation of the relationship, not only showing the happiness of our actor when he is with his girlfriend but also the anger and sadness he experiences. By implementing these elements inside our music video, we are hoping that our star’s persona and the dominant reading of our star is according to what we meant for it to be. Other than the music video itself, there are other ways to create an image for the audience, which can be done through branding. Branding is how we show our star to the audience to create a brand image that the audience can interpret. This includes the star persona, dominant reading, visuals and themes, as these features are all included when branding is done correctly. One of the ways a star persona can be shown through branding is including this with meaning into our digipak or the social media. This can be shown by the colours or design of the digipak, inputting hidden meanings that the audience can interpret, which reflects the star persona of our actor. For example, using a dark theme and dark lighting will create a sense of sadness, aligning with the song's mellow tones. Doing research of our genre was the first step that needed to be done when recreating the music video. We analysed similarities of several music videos in the Indie Genre and noted conventions of the genre. We realised that Indie is a genre where production is low budgeted and minimalistic, which means the music video does not need to be highly edited and does not require a studio to shoot the scenes, which is one of the conventions we conformed to. Another convention we decided to conform to is that the indie genre always involves a romantic story in their music video. In the music video we recreated, our star is shown in a romantic relationship with his girlfriend. We are also keeping the low-budget theme of an Indie music video and keeping our digipaks minimalistic with monotone colours to stay within the genre conventions. However, we didnt convert any of the conventions other than the concept of the original music video, which was recording the scenes on the beach. Our music video can appeal to different audiences as we represent high school students who fell too deeply in love with their significant other to the point where the break-up affects the student's physical activities and mental health. Our actor spending quality time with his girlfriend represents Indonesian students who are experiencing the highs and lows of commitment at such a young age. Relationships in an Indie music video are usually portrayed as emotional and often lead to heartbreak. Our music video shows this by having our actors having fun with each other in the beginning but slowly falling out of love, highlighting both positive and negative sides to love. This can be related to the cultivation theory by George Gerbner, where the audience’s beliefs are reinforced when they see the same belief on social media. Those young audiences that have experienced these hardships can feel more connected to our music video aligning with our goal of creating a relatable narrative/storyline for young audiences that have dealt with similar experiences. This also aligns with Stuart Hall’s Reception theory, which encourages different readings. Audiences can interpret different meanings from our music video and have the option to either agree or create their meaning. We also created a social media page that can engage with the audience using interactive content such as teaser clips, album photos, and behind-the-scenes footage. Giving teaser clips and behind-the-scene images will make the fans wonder how the music video will look and allow them to anticipate the full video. This aligns with the Hermeneutic code from the 5 narrative codes by Barthes, where a media product is created with a cliffhanger to make the audience wonder what will happen next. Teaser clips are as good as cliffhangers, which are designed to keep the reader guessing until the final reveal happens. The engaging content will keep audiences attracted just like the uses and gratifications theory of personal identity, relatable themes/plot allow audiences to imagine themselves being in the story where in this case the music video. Some technologies that have made this achievable are Instagram for short-form content and highly accessible records of audience interaction. The music video we recreated is meant to target the younger audience that has a relatable story recreating an Indie music video, following the conventions while including some of our unique ideas, which is the purpose of our project. Our strategy of branding and social media engagement through platforms like Instagram and TikTok, providing teaser content like behind-the-scenes, makes our project more engaging for the audience. Overall, our project turned out to be successful as we successfully targeted young audiences while still maintaining the Indie aesthetic, keeping the low-budget visuals conforming to all of the Indie music video conventions.

This is the link to the CCR docs in case in blogpost it does not look nice:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wx5m756Gr3vhOVuw33iZkx3nmFFD_P2tNVEr1QYhnO8/edit?usp=sharing 

Screen test: Audience Feedback

This post explains how we showed a rough draft of our music video, album cover, and social media page to some members of our target audience in order to receive helpful feedback.

The purpose of a 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 it is a fast and efficient way to collect data as we can easily share it to people (through sharing the link for the google form). Here are some of our questions: 

Music Video Survey Questions

1. Describe the artist in three words

2. What do you think is the message of the video?

Digipak Survey Questions (Album Cover)

1. What emotions do you feel when looking at our digipak? (1-5 scale)

2. Who do you think is the target audience from how the digipak looks?

3. Do you feel the design conforms to the Indie genre?

4. What do you think should be changed/modified from our album cover?

Social Media Survey Questions

1. Do you follow any artists from the Indie genre? (E.g., Reality Club, Joji, D4vd, Arctic Monkeys, etc)

2. What do you like about that artist's social media? (E.g., Their posts, stories, followings)

3. What do you think of our Star's name (Do0od)?

We chose these questions because we believe by collecting these data, we would be able to match whether the audience interpreted the same readings/messages, as us, about the drafts of the music video, digipak, social media and our star’s persona. If it matches up, we’re going in the right direction, if not, we need to find out what needs to be improved upon. 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 difficult because me and my team just finished the drafts near the deadline and the time was already late at night, so there were not many people to survey. Here are the drafts that we showed audiences for the screen test: 

Music Video Draft

Youtube Link:  https://youtu.be/cFa4rSGcsvM 

(Cannot import as video because of copyright)

If link above is not working, here is our google drive link for our music video draft: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytVEdqMcUpe7MXCGStXfSJoAq3h4Dq7q/view?usp=sharing 

Social Media Draft

Digipak Draft

Here are the results from the audience feedback:

Results from Music Video Draft Survey

Feedback from my teacher for the music video draft

By noting down these feedback, we get to know what parts of our video we need to improve on and we could always refer back to it just in case we forgot. It also acts as a check list for what to do next to make specific parts

of the video better.

Results from Social Media & Digipak Draft Survey

From the feedback we learned that all of our audience uses Instagram for daily use so we’re going to target them by making our star’s profile on Instagram. Then, the audience stated that the introduction of the music video draft was slightly dull/dark so we learned from that mistake and are going to improve it through editing it brighter for the final video. Also we’re planning to add abstract illustrations for the background for our album so that it fills up the empty space in the digipak.

We are going to change our star’s name, from Do0od to Do0d, to make it look simpler and cleaner. This also makes it easier for our audience to look up our star in social media. Furthermore, based on the music video feedback, we’re going to make the happy scenes use more vibrant colours in order to make the scene feel more energetic and to further connote that our artist is in a cheerful mood.

This screen test was a useful part of our process because it helped us gain audience feedback and we could identify whether they have the same understanding of the message conveyed as us. Based on the feedback received, we believe we’re going in the right direction as most audiences have the same readings that we originally intended for the music video, social media, and digipak drafts and only need a few adjustments to improve them.

Reflection: How did this screen test help your overall project? How will you improve this next time?

In this project i created the possible look of the album cover which took some time but left all of us satisfied. We divided the task to finish this post much faster and do things efficiently. This screen test did help us on the project as we were able to keep things on track which made us finish things faster. Such as the filming, editing, and some other blog posts that would need to be done. We can now focus more on the social media of our artist and the critical self-reflection. 

Editing

 This blogpost is created by Bagas will include the editing process of our music video. 

I have always used capcut from all the previous projects such as the documentary, it is simple to use and the UI is

easily noticeable, by that I mean it's easy to locate elements ( effects and other adjustments )  .

Capcut labels the elements clearly such as transitions, captions and vice versa. This makes it easier to locate the

required editing features. Also this tab that previews the clips before adding it makes it less time consuming since

I will know which video to add ( if there are multiple videos that look similar, by clicking it once capcut allows

the user to view the video before inputting in onto the timeline . 

The first step I did was laying out all of the clips in a chronological order, following our storyboard, then the song

was added. A major feedback that changed most of the editing was when our teacher said to cut and edit to the

beat of the song, this gives it a smoother flow and makes it look neater. 

I followed up with adding adjustments towards the music clips, retouching them by changing the lighting, contrast,

etc. 

PROBLEMS:

• Multiple problems I had with editing is that in the process of it, we had flaws with our shooting

            therefore everytime we reshoot I had to readjust multiple clips within the video, such as the

            timing and editing.

• Another problem I had was since its mostly handheld the camera angles the clips were very

            shaky and it didnt look good

• Color and lighting as well was very different from each other since we used multiple devices

            ( each has different setting and quality)

• Time management , I was being barraged with school mocks so It was quite difficult for me to

               spare some time for editing , unless its a media project lesson 

• Loads of the features in capcut requires a premium membership and its quite expensive 

SOLUTIONS:

This is one of capcuts handy features which stabilizes the clips, eventhough it requires a friendship, me and my f

riends gathered up money and bought the membership in order to use this feature. The results were satisfying ,

the clips didn’t have a significant change other than it being stable . 

Another feature of CapCut is the apply to all buttons. This allows a clip’s adjustments to be copied throughout all

the clips, since I said the problem was that most of the clips were different , this feature allowed the clips to look

more similar to each other. This reduces the time to edit and makes the process much quicker.

As for the missing parts or recording problems when editing, instead of removing a whole section then ruining

the whole timing again, I can replace the section with temporary text labeled the section that needs to be filled

in. For example, 

It can be replaced with text like this as a way to mark the missing spots.

Not only will this help in editing but itll help with recording as it keeps track of things that we need to fix or extra

recordings we need to do . 

As for time management problems, it was a major consequence of mine for not being able to manage time

properly . Next time i'd have to free up more time for this

This blog was made by Bagas, which shows how the editing process was done. My job was to help the editing process by giving small feedbacks such as reshooting a blurry scene, acting out the storyboard to make it easier for our star to shoot the scene. The problem with editing was that it can only be done when the shooting is done, and with the delays and unexpected problems, it is hard for us to find time when all of us can attend the shooting day. This makes the editing process harder as it is rushed by the deadline, but my teammate that takes the editing job, Bagas and Saka, were able to finish the process and finalising our music video. We didn't really do anything aside from trying to shoot more whenever all four of us were present to cover the days where we cancelled our shooting plans.