Critical Creative Reflection: Counting Stars

Critical Creative Reflection

Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YEDMvUEZyVl7bJGcsEnShlsHK1IWyDk9ncSf9Z7FIy8/edit

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

I chose to do my music video for the song Counting Stars by OneRepublic. I stuck to the conventions of the folk pop and pop rock genres with my video. In the video for “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction, the setting is the beach, and you see the band members hanging out on the beach and singing. Likewise, in the video for “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back” by Shawn Mendes, one of the settings was him running outside through Paris. I also chose to use an outdoor setting for most of my video, but I chose to do mine in a park with lots of nature. I chose this park because it has a lot of vines in it, and I wanted that to go with the line of the song that said, “I see this life like a swinging vine”.

In the videos that I researched, they moved between a few different areas within the outdoor setting with cuts between them. Likewise, I chose to walk on a path, climb up in a treehouse and be in my backyard. When I set up my storyboard, I made sure to move between these locations and when I edited, I made sure to use cuts between the scenes.

A lot of pop songs, like Counting Stars, are about everyday regular things and so it makes sense to be in an everyday, regular setting – in this case outside. Since these songs address everyday things, they appeal to a wide variety of people – not only a specific social group. And at the end of the day, it is really just a fun-loving song.


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

I think my video is special and fun because it shows me smiling and singing and I think it would make people feel good when they watch it. I tried to pick a great location for my setting and really engage with the viewer when I sang so that they would feel like I was singing to them. And the song I chose has a great beat and memorable tune, so people would want to watch the video over again just to hear the music.

If this was a professional video, I would first release it on YouTube. This would be a great choice because YouTube is one of the best places to watch videos. Whenever I want to watch a music video, this is the first place I go. I would follow that up by sending the link to everyone I know and ask them to send it out to everyone they know so that it would get more viewers. My second choice for releasing my professional video would be MTV. MTV, or Music Television, was created to show music videos and so this would be another great choice. Unlike YouTube, you can’t search MTV for a video, so people wouldn’t be able to go there and immediately see my video, but it would be a great way to introduce it to people who like this type of music. It could be a great way to grow my audience.

 

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

When we started this process, I researched other videos in the folk pop and pop rock genres. When I did this, I learned a lot about what they do and that helped me to start thinking about what I would do for my video. I decided to use an outdoor setting because several of the videos I researched did that. I decided to wear regular clothes instead of a fancy costume because it’s more comfortable and because in most of the videos I researched, they wore regular clothes. This is probably because many of the songs in this genre talk about things that listeners deal with every day.

When I started shooting my video, I learned quickly that you need to have several takes. The reason is that if you don’t, you might end up with video that you can’t use and you might not know that until you start editing. Also, even though I was using the audio from the real song, it was important for me to sing the words out loud when I was shooting my video. Otherwise, it was really hard to figure out how to line the video up with the audio when I was editing.

My editing improved as I worked because I got more familiar with how to use the editing program I chose and I got more familiar with the scenes of my video. I learned that it was better to start at the beginning and get everything lined up right before I added the next scene because if I tried to go back to an earlier scene it was much harder to fix.


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

For this project I chose to use my iPhone to film all of the scenes. My dad has a still camera, but we don’t have a video camera, so this made the most sense. Plus, its easy to carry around and I already know how to use it. It was also easy to review the video cuts as I went to be sure I had enough film to work with. After filming, I could easily transfer the video clips from my phone to my mom’s computer so that I could review them again there and decide which clips were best to use in my final video. I started out using Capcut to edit, but I was having a lot of trouble getting it to work, so I decided to use Microsoft Clip Champ – a software program that was on my mom’s computer. It was similar to Capcut, but easier for me to use. And I could download a 1080p copy of my video to the computer to review before I posted it. I wanted to post the final version of the video onto my Blogger page because I’ve been posting all of my work for the video, including all of my research and production notes, on Blogger. I wasn’t able to embed the final video into Blogger without using YouTube, but it only took a few minutes to upload the video from Clip Champ into YouTube to post.

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