Critical Creative Reflection

 Dearest reader, 

Below is a link to a doc, and the content covered in it. The questions I answered helped me reflect on my journey as a director!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f99Zxe9TF1Skygs_bsfs9vrMeSfoQq8DNGD9Rjq4AlY/edit

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

My music video focuses on the conventional breakup as it is usually portrayed in the media. The idea of this video was to challenge the idea that people always recover from breakups quickly and in this powerful self assurance montage. It is all too common in film, TV, and even music videos for a character to go through a short period of mourning over a breakup and then have their magical redemption montage. Even within the original music video for this song, the main character ends the video as a successful author and the guy is seen watching her “come back”. However, I think that this ideal situation neglects the real pain and hardship of a breakup, especially if it was long term or a first love, or in the case of this video, both. Throughout the course of my lifetime I have been witness to the first loves, and first breakups of friends and family members. It would be a lie to say that we all do not have that one friend who does go put on their jewelry and a cute outfit and move right along, but what no one wants to mention is that we also all have the friend who sobs themself to the verge of vomiting. When I saw this for the first time in real life, I thought something was wrong with them. There had been no indication in my whole entire life that the end of a relationship could leave a long term scar which may not be healed in any romantic way. I wanted this video to challenge the idea of this breakup that makes a life better, and show the breakups that just plain suck for a while.

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

My music video engages with audiences through realism. I have the privilege of many resources for filming locations, mis-en-scene, etc., but I made this film realistic on purpose. This film is not supposed to resonate with the people who want a perfect pastel world, but rather those who understand that even cordial, bright lives include dark places. The idea of using a yearbook as this sort of passage through time was something I hoped would strike nostalgia in older, matured generations. While youth will be impacted by the nature of the video alone, the matured population tends to forget their first loves and first true heartbreaks. The use of a yearbook was meant to invoke those memories of going through the motions of dating while young and naive. As a real media text, I think I would push this as a periodless piece. Timeless pieces of media such as “A Series of Unfortunate Events” speak to a larger audience emotionally and psycologically. The use of a non-descript time period makes the film exciting to vintage enthusiasts, elders, curious youth, people who love the artist the music is originally from, and other, limitless walks of life. 

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

Mainly, I had a real problem with conveying the storyline of this piece. When I was vision boarding, it seemed so clear to me what was going to be involved. Even throughout filming and the beginning stages of editing I was trying to cram everything on my storyboard into a little over a minute of music. It really was not until the final throes of editing that I had to become comfortable with leaving good shots out for the sake of quality, and also the unavoidable time constraints. I almost had a heartattack several times over the editing platform I used, and I am not entirely sure if I will ever get this right. First I tried the platform a family friend gave to me on a USB drive, it worked for about ten minutes and crashed from incompatibility with my computer’s windows settings. I switched to Blender after hearing raving reviews, only to find out if I thought I wanted to pull my hair out learning HitFilm Express, Blender was the “Godzilla” of editing software. I went back to HitFilm Express only to have the same quality issues as before, and lose my patience for ruined clips that I worked so hard on. Finally out of desperation I used Microsoft ClipChamp. These situations really challenged my patience in production since editing is always what I struggled with most. I also came to a whole new level of appreciation for why “Stranger Things” takes so long to come out.

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

The main integration of technology is always in the editing journey of a project for me. I film all of my footage on my Canon camera as it has amazing quality. This required a whole new learning curve when I started with it and I sometimes still struggle with angling my tripod. The transfer from camera to laptop became a relatively simple integration after the first google tutorial for it. The process, however, after the footage is loaded onto my laptop, is a straight up pilgrimage. I get the shots out of my photos app into ClipChamp. Since I am notorious for missing something in my first cropping run, I scrub the footage twice, once for length of the shot, and a second time for cropping issues. This is all done in Microsoft ClipChamp. Then I use my phone to screenrecord the music off of YouTube and send it to myself via Google Drive since the audio is too large to email. I then separate the audio from the video of the screen recording using ClipChamp so that the visuals do not interfere with my footage. Finally I add video, transitions, and then audio into my timeline. I finished this project with credits to wrap it up nicely and give credits to the song artist.