Critical Reflection

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

  My music video uses a variety of conventions. Zooming out would be a camera convention used in it. The establishing shot makes the scene and background of the video known to the watcher. There is no audio in the video besides the music itself. Lastly, we use fading in and out to make the transition between our clips for editing. We also all chose to use black clothing as our costumes and edited the video to turn it black and white rather than it be in color. Our whole group was wearing black outfits during the duration of the recording session at the park. The park was also empty, giving a feeling of isolation in the personal tracking shots of each group member. The outfits gave a sense that we were all feeling that loneliness and isolation even if we were together. The costumes also aligned with the Beatles themselves who often wore matching outfits in their music videos and performances. One social group/issue represented in our video is overall sadness and depression. As it can be seen in the video, we are very serious and do not smile in the video. Perhaps it is to show that we are all dealing with something in our lives that keeps us down.

2) How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as real media text?

  The video engages with the audience by using its visuals. The costume choice would certainly be able to resonate with a viewer. If they see that we are wearing all black, and look gloomy, and a sad song is playing in the background it would probably resonate and connect to him if they feel the same way. Part of a good song is that people can relate to it in one way or another. It would be distributed by using Vimeo. Vimeo is an app that anyone is able to use to watch videos or post their own videos. When it came time for our group to pick a platform to post our music video on, Vimeo did not initially come to mind. We decided to go with YouTube as we were already previously acquainted with using that to post our older videos. There came a problem where YouTube would not upload our music video because of the song we used and its material. Video however is more lenient and did not give us any problems uploading it. By doing this, we learned that this new Vimeo platform may be useful to us in distributing our videos with music that may have certain material that other apps would not allow and perhaps other kinds of videos and projects in the future.

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

  My production skills did seemingly improve in the duration of the project. Before we started, I was not very confident with my abilities or most of my teams abilities. I did not have much experience with making videos especially music videos. I did have an interest in it however and was definitely excited to start this project. We started off picking a genre of music. One member wanted something old. Another wanted a sad song. I learned to compromise by asking them to pick a song that was both of these, and short enough to be able to include a good enough clip of it. Making compromises certainly speeds up the process of production. Less time is spent arguing over little things and more gets accomplished. Speaking of this, time wasn’t on our side either as we had a lot of planning to do in a relatively small amount of time. I learned to work with a group and divide the work to get more stuff done faster. We also learned to work as a team during filming and editing. Filming wasn’t easy without a good cameraman. Keeping a steady hand was not easy, and with these group members being your friends it is even harder than it should be. Picking a clip that most matches the image of perfection in your mind was also a thing we did a lot during the filming process.

4) How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware, and online - in this project?

  First, we took note of what similar songs as our choice and their respective music videos looked like. We wanted to make it black and white and wear matching outfits like the other Beatles's songs. The editing software we chose to make it happen was CapCut. This editing software app was the one that was recommended for use in the editing of our videos. It is widely used among people who want access to a good amount of easy to use tools for no cost. I didn’t have experience in this app, and was eager to give it a try. We used this to combine all of our clips in the correct order. Then we made it in black and white by messing with the saturation, it took a little bit of getting used to but we eventually learned to master CapCut for editing. Once we got everything the way we needed it, we downloaded the finished product and that concluded our work for the time being. Now that we were done and had the final product, it was time to upload it. We initially tried YouTube but unfortunately it didn’t work. Vimeo however did work and I believe this platform can be useful for future projects with similar content to this one.