The CCR midterm

 

1.      How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues?

This song fits into the hip-hop, r&b, and rap genre. This particular artist, Kanye West, is extremely unique and loves to convey a message in his music. So, his music videos usually tell a story that is somewhat different from the mainstream aspect of the genres his music is inside of. The conventions in the mainstream side of this genre are usually, people being over-sexualized to bring in a specific audience. Other conventions on the mainstream side would be a very energetic and hyped rapping at the camera, unlike a story. Our product mostly challenges these conventions because the artist that made the song in our music video is very original and loves to create a message in his music. He's a very alternative artist in his genre, so challenging these conventions was somewhat inevitable. We really focused on portraying the story he created with the song. With our music video, we conveyed the intense message he portrayed in his music. The song was about a girl growing up in a society where she's overlooking the negatives of her relationships and just letting people use her. This form of abuse can really connect to groups of people who have gone through this and this issue. Our music video is meant to bring awareness to such issues of physical and verbal abuse. We also wanted to emphasize the mental strain and abuse our main actress was going through because she trusted people who ended up being the ones who hurt her. Our story didn't really resolve itself or had a “happy ending”, the whole situation needed to be exhibited, to really lay down what happens in actual reality. What people go through on a daily basis and struggle to get out of. I truly believe that this music video could help people identify with their situation and use this to help themselves.

2. How does your product engage with audiences AND how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Our product definitely engages with the audience because it connects them to a situation that is a common reality for some. This issue allows people to really empathize with the actors and put themselves in that situation. The video is very aesthetically pleasing which really grabs the attention of the viewers watching. The storyline connects them to the video and keeps them watching to see an outcome. Wanting to understand what the actor is going through can really captivate an audience. One of our main goals in making this video was to try to get our audience to connect with our story, and we tried to do this in many ways. Such as using the different colored lighting in each scene. This was to really connect the audience to the one emotion the actor was portraying in that specific scene. We used specific angles and movements throughout our whole video as another way to assist our audience in trying to understand our actress and her situation We want to get the audience to grow an emotional attachment to our main actress. If our project was distributed as a real media text it would probably be on YouTube. With YouTube, It would be a good advertisement for his song. Additionally, a lot of different types of people and audiences could view this and connect to it. Since it's such a wide platform maybe people can relate to the situation and find comfort in the song, which would then be a good advertisement. Plus it's easier to share content on a website such as YouTube. 

3.      How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

My production skills developed immensely throughout this project. I started off not understanding how to make movements flow seamlessly. But over time became easier and easier. The first couple of times that I got to film I tried out different movements and angles that I've learned throughout this class. I even kept out on my phone the PowerPoint at the beginning of the year that listed all of the movement and angles. My favorite shots to do are the over-the-shoulder angle, We ended up doing this shot a lot because this movement can really connect the audience to that scene. The camera acts as though the audience is present in that situation.  Also, this movement helps to show the text coming in on the phone. It's the only smooth shot that can show the text clearly. Other shots that we like to use were the aerial shots or birdseye. We thought that this was a good shot to really establish a scene. It shows the surroundings which then helps with conveying the message of that specific scene. When I was the one filming I really focused on getting the perfect angle to really set the scene. Before we started the scene the filmer would go through the angles and movements they thought were best before the scene started. We thought this was the best way to capture the perfect shot. Sometimes the scenes would take a bit longer than expected or we’d have to redo it, which would be laborious because then we'd have to find the perfect angle all over again. Overall the filming was definitely my favorite part throughout this entire process. If it was me acting in it or if I was filming. We made sure before we started that we had all of the scene worked out, making sure we didn't have any blank moments. We'd have a couple of moments wherein some scenes we knew what we wanted to do, but we didn't know how to get the proper angle. To elaborate, if Alexa and I were having a sleepover and we were both in a scene, we didn’t really have had anybody to film us. So throughout that time, we would test out a lot of spots all across our location that we could place the phone. We even taped the phone on the roof in the third scene. Even though sometimes it would be a lot of work, it was an overall great experience. I know Alexa and I both really enjoyed making this music video because we both got the opportunity to be creative in our own aspects. 

4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project? 

Technology definitely played the main role throughout this process. We used it for research, editing, planning, and how we uploaded it. The editing software we use was clip champs, which was extremely effective. We both use clip champs before and we are familiar with all of its software tools. Editing was definitely the most time-consuming aspect of this process. While editing, we focused on many things. But more specifically we usually focused on putting the scenes in a way and order to make the music video flow. Since we never really did a continuous filming day, we had to edit very often. To exemplify, we would film a single scene then edited together, find spaces that we still have yet to finish, then go film what we needed to fill in that space. Then add it in all over again. If a scene was too long and we needed it to end at a specific point, we would use the tool from clip champs to speed up a scene or slow it down. We also used some tools to color correct a scene that might have been too bright or didn't fit the theme. While editing we'd also write on a piece how many seconds a blank spot is so that we knew when filming how long it must be. This was important to make sure that we captured all we needed to capture, in a scene that could still fit into the specific section. While researching, we went on Google, YouTube, and a bunch of other websites. We researched many things such as the different conventions of our song’s genre and interviews where Kanye West talked about what the song meant. We also had some trouble uploading the music video to YouTube. We didn't really understand the whole copyright situation, so we had to get that sorted out quickly so that we could meet the deadline.

1.      How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues?

2. How does your product engage with audiences AND how would it be distributed as a real media text?

3.      How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

  

4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project?