Critical self reflection

 Below here is my critical self reflection for this component 3 project of making music videos. 

In this year’s component 3 project, we are instructed to make a promotional product which includes a digipak, (album, album cover and disc) a social media page which engages with the audience and also promotes our content of promotion. We are also instructed to make and produce our own music video. We chose the indie genre with the song of. “Here with me” by young and upcoming Indie singer, “d4vd” which was released in late 2022. This song is about love and breakups (a usual and easy theme to work with). We named our star d0od as we think it's a simple and easily pronounceable name. We also took inspiration from how d4vd named himself in stage name. We made him a persona in which he is a person who values love deeply. In the first half of the music video, he is seen happy and enjoying his life and his time with his love interest, in the second half, he is all sad and lonely because of seperation. We tried to incorporate reception theory in the form of dominant reading in trying to give the saying that love has its ups and downs. Relationships are never a smooth journey.

 We did a lot of research on branding, branding is important in order to create an identity for the final product in which people would directly know who the star is based from how they brand and present themselves. D0od aims to create a brand in which he is a lonely teenage who was once happy and now looking for love, we used happy themed videos first in order to create the sense of happiness followed by clips in which I (the star) am in sorrow as I just got left out of the relationship. We used dark theme pictures in order to create the branding of loneliness and sadness in which we used photoshoots of me, the star. All of this basically tells that we are using the star as more of our branding tool as his persona itself would be the main theme of our products (sadness). This again, follows the theory of dominant reading from reception theory incorporated by theorist Stuart Hall in which we want people to believe that his sadness is his persona, his branding. 

 In our music video research, we found out several conventions that match the indie theme, we found out that indie music videos are once again, usually low budget, in which they use the natural settings around them to create a meaning in music videos. Examples include shooting at night to connote sadness (what we do) and shooting in the morning to connote happiness, the start of a new thing (we did that too). Some basic locations are each other's houses, parks, roads around us and also school. We conformed to these conventions by also making our music video in a DIY form, in which we recorded using simple, low budget tools such as a phone camera. We also used my room as a shooting setting which is low budget as we do not have to rent any silly places. We also focus on simple performances such as basically just singing into the camera, just lyp syncing and having fun instead of high budget activity such as having too much people to join our music video (we only had one) 

 Through our digipak, we can safely say that we conformed to the values of indie production as we followed the once again, simple conventions of indie. We found out that indie artists don’t really put too much effort in designing their digipak, they are often minimalistic in font design and they have basic colours that they put on their album covers. In our case, we also put small, minimalist fonts with little to no decoration but just blurred and filtered out pictures of myself.

 In the music video, we wanted to represent teenagers and make a statement on how teenage love is not to be underestimated, and teenage love can make or break your future relationships and outlook of love. Of course, we wanted to target younger teens from 17+, both men and women and people in relationships. This is through the use of young actors (me and the woman in the music video) in which we are in a relationship (in the music video). We also made them use young, minimalistic clothes to conform to the indie genre and to emphasize on how young they are. Both these age appearances and fashion decisions are mis included as mis en scene. Through camera angles, we used long angles to show that they are both teenagers who still attend school, which is a representation of youth. And used close up shots to focus on their emotions and how young people are in love (their expressions of joy, their way of spending time in school is youth representation by itself). Through editing, we used jump cuts to show how fast youth goes by, and how fast love can go bad. Jump cuts give us the ability to timeskip through time and give meaning that life goes fast. Through sound, the music already gives itself meaning (valuing young love, love is not to be messed with). As we are talking about representation, we can use representation theory by Stuart Hall that media helps language help create impressions on social groups, in this case, media language would be through music videos, mise en scene and sound/ edit, and the impression is young love, being depicted in the music video. 

 In the terms of our social media page, we rely on Bulmer and Katz’ uses and gratification theory in the topic of personal identity and surveillance. For personal identity, we used social media to post pictures of our young actors, our captions are also short, minimalistic and simple as how young people and Gen Z will do it. Our posts are also random, unserious and laid back, just like the chill mindset of young people these days, in which it would connect with them thus relating to their personal identity. The content that we post would be our daily lives, fit pictures (clothes) and unserious pictures such as random animals (cats) in which young peoples’ impulsive minds would love to click, this is a sign that we made use of the surveillance theory uses and gratifications as they would surely wait just to see one of d0od’s posts. We used our laptops and phones to post our content and engage with audiences, and we used cameras both fully handheld and phone pocket cameras to produce the content (e.g photos from photo shoots using phone and real camera) 

 In conclusion, the purpose of our product is to show how young love is serious and how it could shape future experiences and how love has its ups and downs from time to time. I can conclude that this project is a success as feedback is mostly positive, people liked our product especially the young people our age (17+) . We also had a fair amount of interaction with the small amount of time we had to promote our social media accounts. Next time, I would allocate and manage my time more properly, effectively using the school sessions in order to complete the project. Overall, this project has been the hardest as it's in the midst of many other projects and mock exams that our school has implemented.

Self Reflection: 

On paper, this prohect could be considered easier as it was just essay writing following some planning structure that Mr gave us, this CCR is important as it tests our knowledge on the media techniques used to create meaning in the product and it lets us explain ourselves the group decisions that were made along the way. But due to me doing this dead last, I needed to stay up, which was very hard as I am already phsyically and mentally exhausted after the insane amount of mocks that are being implemented at school (which includes 3 media mocks)