Creative critical reflection.

I believe that through this project I have learned a lot about the conventions of real music videos as in the beginning I had a lot of different ideas of how I wanted to make my video. I do know that the conventions within a music video are based on a lot of techniques used and because my video was a performance music video, most of the techniques I used were “simple” regarding the camera work, when filming I used a tripod which helped me keep a clear and stable shot throughout most of the music video, I did so also play around with other locations in my filming space to create a playful sensation to go with the music beat. Furthermore regarding the editing, I followed my genres conventions of a lot of cutting to beat and a fast editing that I believe suited well with the song I chose.

Regarding the starting idea of the video, color coding, lighting and the mise en scene helped me create a sensation of high saturation vibrant color that was the main visual in the video. As an example in the filming process, I chose a day that following the weather predictions where I live had a vibrant natural light working with the white walls in my location which I chose specifically due to the window placement giving it a marvellous natural lighting helped me later in my editing process. Moreover regarding the digipak, I tried to follow a simple digipack style that I had repeatedly seen when looking for inspiration. As an example, during my research I analysed Rhianna’s “good girl gone bad” digipak and to the eye it had a simple look, after digging deeper and trying to find a clearer meaning I realised that the  decisions taken creating the digipak had a lot to do with the name of the album, I saw this repeatedly through various pop genre digipaks which gave me a lot of inspiration when creating my own. Because of this when I created my digipak I followed a simple style by choosing a picture of my performers editing it and adding the text, this tho had a lot of thinking behind it taking in count that my main code is vibrant colors, so as said before when I was explaining about the color coding in my video, I used high saturation and vibrant color editing that contrasted with the title that I chose to be of the color pink as the background image had a lot of green and orange undertones, this again created a contrast of colors that popped to the eye.

Following this idea, when researching social media pages I found that most of the artists posted about their personal life as well as their musical advances and news. For example Kanye West is very active on twitter and creates daly tweets about things like god or what he is thinking, this in a way keeps him connected with his fans as they can respond or comment on what he is tweeting, it also can be seen as a way to attract a wider audience as a lot of his tweets do go viral and different audiences that do not know about him can see themselves thinking similar things to him and therefore getting into a deeper research about him and his star persona that is obviously linked to what he posts about. As a consequence when creating my social media page I did post about the filming process and what the performers did behind the cameras, this was to keep my main audiences updated on what was going on and keeping them up with the new album that contained the music video and etcetera. This follows up to my audience, as you can see in my blog I did do a target audience video explaining the age range background and other information of the main audiences for my music video.

During the process I tried to follow the main conventions that attracted these audiences and I do believe that I succeeded with most of them, for example, one of my main ideas was colourful vibrant modernistic makeup that was a main trait of my music video and branding, this would attract a young audience as well as audiences that work in the makeup industry or even photography or cinematic industry, as an example for this impact due to this simple idea of makeup, we can talk about the show “euphoria” that created a whole movement due to the modernistic makeup looks used through the show.

Regarding branding, I tried to brand my whole project around one specific point which was color. You can clearly see the link between the music video, digipak, social media page and further production products such as performers profiles that the idea of high saturated colors was very present, this is due to a tik tok trend that was going on when I started the project which started with a group of american girls putting wigs on and using a high saturation filter to make their videos , this became extremely viral on social media and was recruited by a lot of people, at one point there was even a group of dads that put on colourful wigs and danced arrow on a video. Therefore, taking inspiration, I created this branding idea of “full of color” that followed the conventions with four main visual points which were the wigs, the makeup, the costume and the setting. With this I created the video, digipak and social media page.

As a consequence, the digipak has pictures that I took during the production that then were edited to fit into the idea of color and reflected the music video and branding image of my performers. This was then repeated on the social media page by posting pictures that the girls took, such as selfies and pictures of each other posing for their own use and posted them on my social media page, this in a way gave a sense of closeness between the performers and audience in the way that the pictures were made by the girls themselves and showed a little of the production. We also have to take in account that as well as the production pictures, I did post the digipak on social media, this gives a star branding identity that is done to keep the audience's updated on their artist’s life and new projects all following the “full of color” idea. 

On another note the main issue my focus group had with my project was that my video was not completed to the full length of the song, this was explained in my blog but due to the circumstances given to us due to the Covid 19 restrictions, I wasn't able to finish my filming process as some of my performers couldn't make it to further filming days. This made me very discontent with myself and organisation as I was very excited to take the full video to a closing and being able to complete this project in the best way possible. 

Finally, the representation in my video was made to target my key audiences, I did this by casting young girl that were my in the main audiences age range and being careful choosing girls with different ethnicities, my case was based on four girls from different places, this fell on a Chinese girl, Arab girl, Bulgarian girl and Spanish girl that made the diversity range wider. I also have to take in count that all of the actresses were females and the idea was a representation of young females having a good time and having a simple dance to the music and rhythm of the song. This was to create a sense of normality due to the craziness that has been going on done to the global pandemic and an empowerment of the young female community to go out and dress up as they want and do what they want. 

On a final note I would like to add that the filming process of my video was made following the restrictions in my area as we used an air purifier during the filming process and all the girls wore masks when they were not performing. Thank you very much for following this journey with me.