Media Studies A Level - Nicholas Binder

This is my critical self reflection of how i worked on the music video component 3 project, the progress ive made and an explanation on the more in depth ideas that were a result of us working together as a team

In this essay I will be discussing the development in different areas of this component, being the pre-production, digipak/album cover, social media, final product and post-production which I worked on together with my wonderful team of talented high-school producers.

A lot of our ideas were scrapped, as in the early stages of brainstorming this component project we had conflicting ideas on the mood of the music video and the artist, the genre, the age of the song, etc. I myself am satisfied with the music and atmosphere we decided to go with, being a story of heartbreak from the start accentuating night and sunset colours in comparison to bright sunny days, brightly lit malls, etc. Regarding storyboards we had a few discussions on who should do it and for most of our projects I did them alone, however for the last 2 projects we realised its much more effective if we all pitch into the shot ideas and get consultation from people who are more familiar with what is possible. Thus we split the task of storyboard between Baron and I. During location scouting i think we had a lot of fun just going to different locations, however we should have expanded our options as we only really set our sights on one location because of how extensive it is, when we should've been properly researching other locations. In the end we did 80% of our scenes on the same beach, the parking lot of that beach and the road to it. However, all of these choices give our music video a lot more character for the audiences to indulge in as it sticks to a theme that we all brainstormed on together, allowing for 4 heads to work better than one. Both Baron and I decided at the start of this joint-work to improve our artistic skills in terms of conveying our images onto paper for our teammates to understand, and so we took lots of advice from our media teacher, some very talented friends’ guidance and many hours of youtube tutorials.

In creating the Digipak, we spent lots of time alongside filming trying out different photo styles, poses, etc, and eventually I tried a design just to experiment, having some lights in the background as well as our artist’s face in the dead centre, all with a glitch effect. The team as well as our media teacher became fond of this and we stuck with that as the front cover as well as an album cover. For the inner side we went through a lot of ideas, taking inspiration from red hot chili peppers, taylor swift, etc. I was most fond of RHCP’s psychedelic track title page, however we realised this wasn’t on them to the purple lighting of JUN, so we stuck with the format however with a more neon purple theme for the picture.

We’ve decided on using social media and a link to connect our audiences to all of our available promotion for the artist. Our Instagram handle (username) is heavily inspired by Drake’s Instagram handle, being ‘champagnepapi’. It has nothing to do with his music, however it showcases his sort of laid-back approach to his online reel persona. We decided to do the same, however instead of having no meaning, we went with a name based off of the effect that JUN has on his audience. As a lot of his songs are sad songs related to heartbreak, most people invested into his music would be crying, and when people cry its most likely in a cozy place such as their bed. Thus, bed_wetterr. However, we had to go around this name in several ways as different names of this has already been taken by other people. I thought that if there were numbers in the name it would look cheap and people might believe that its a fake account if he were to not have a blue tick, so we stuck with an underscore and two (r)s. Our posts are heavily inspired by Bruno Mars’ charm in looks as well as Snoop Dogg’s very memeable page for the captions. Some ideas such as performance locations and more were also inspired by our upperclassmens’ media project that I saw last year.

In our music video, we represent teenagers who are often depicted as being in love. We show these young adults going through the different struggles of different stages in their love lives. Our representation is both positive and negative, as it shows the build-up to their relationship, their happy-go-lucky days and the dream turned sour near the end, where we use the media language of lighting, clothing, facial expressions as well as behaviour to conform to this representation. We took a lot of inspiration for this music video from pre-wedding videos, romance movies, etc. Our main inspirations however was from a fanmade music video of “I Love You So - The Walters” using clips from the movie 500 days of summer. The reason for this is that we all admired the frame composition, characters and lighting choices used in most of these shots, and so we decided to make something in a similar theme. That movie also utilises a lot of fragmented narrative, which eventually became our whole concept. Other than those sunlit scenes, we made do with what we had at the time of filming being purple light sticks as well as ambient street lights. With this we maintained a rather consistent theme for certain moods.

To explain the media language we used to set the narrative and atmosphere, i will be referencing parts of our video. Since the male romance lead is supposed to represent a younger version of JUN, our artist, hes wearing more immature stylish fashion choices, whereas JUN, being older and supposedly revisiting his memories for the duration of the song is wearing a formal button up, presenting himself as more mature. The intro to this music video also pose as foreshadowing for young JUN as starting the music video with the end of the relationship, where hes seen driving a much more expensive car than is shown when he was in the relationship. The blue and purple lights were also first introduced here, establishing our theme of anguish.

This is the digipak research conducted by Rania, from which we took lots of ideas and inspiration.

Most of the resources I have researched were from the platform pinterest. I was going through photos in other search engines such as google yet to find the aesthetic we are looking for, the pinterest platform was the best in giving results.

Reflection: Based on the photos above, artists usually have their albums set with a certain color and style which we plan to incorporate in our project. Right now, as we have decided to take shots on a film camera it may be possible to create a vintage theme in our cover, hence I put forward the idea of maybe having a vintage scrapbook concept, it would be easier to create and the amount of possibilities to create doodles and have stickers might give it an edge. Based on a lot of the young artists I have research, it is trendy nowadays to include minimalistic designs yet have the star to be the centre focus instead of a maximalist design that may draw attention away from the artist.