The Start Of It All

 Hi guys, it's Paula!

Today seems to be the start of a very long, but exciting process: the creation of an opening scene. And it is all under my control and creativity, pretty nerve-racking. In just the matter of a few weeks, you will all be able to see what I come up with, but, luckily, you are all also going to come along with me on the journey. I will be posting here multiple times a week in order to keep you all updated on my thought process and on the progress of my opening scene. I'm looking forward to this journey and I hope you enjoy it as much as I will. 

Before diving right into this process headfirst, I wanted to let you guys in on my initial thoughts going into this. 

Ideas I have: Going into all of this, I'm not sure exactly what I want to do. There's so much possibilities my brain just isn't able to pick one idea. However, I have a specific genre in mind. I started off by thinking what some of my favorite movie genres are. A lot of my favorite movies fall under the thriller/crime category (movies like se7en, silence of the lambs, fallen) so initially this was a big idea in my head. However, I don't think I could create something to the best of my abilities under this genre. So, after thinking about it long and hard, I cancelled that out. After some more process of elimination, I considered some of my other favorite movies, movies such as Moonrise Kingdom, mid90s and The Florida Project. All of these fall under the drama category, which seems a little more in reach. This is definitely a category that I could see myself doing and executing to the very best of my abilities. All of this is still up in the air and some research is definitely necessary but, I think it's a very good place to start. 

What I hope to gain from this: I hope to gain a lot from this project. Since I will be recording my every step in this journey, I hope to adopt very good research practices. I also hope to apply all of my research into my work in the best, most logical way possible. I hope to learn a lot about the genre I decide to go with and about what makes that genre so unique. We have learned that in class and done research on it but I hope to learn about it much more in depth, especially because I have to apply my findings into an actual film.  I also hope to get comfortable with all the techniques and methods we have learned about in class, at least enough to effectively apply them in my project in a way that makes it 10 times better and that gives it much more meaning that just a video. I think learning more about the application of these techniques and having to do it myself will help me when I have to analyze these techniques in other pieces of media. Another thing I hope to improve is my editing skills. The media studies course has already helped with that so much but I am determined to make this piece look as professional and as real as possible so I will need all the editing techniques and knowledge I can get. 

Challenges I may face: Right now, I think this is all looking very optimistic; However, I do have some concerns that I will be trying to steer away from in the process of making my film. Time is definitely a big worry. A couple of weeks does seem like a long time for this but those weeks are going to be full of intense research that will lead me to the final product. I need to make sure I stay on task and don't procrastinate to get this done as best as I can. Another concern I have is having my opening scene not get a clear message across to the viewers. In order to avoid this I will need to put in a lot of time into the small components of my film and make sure that everything is planned and done correctly. If I stay on task, I shouldn't have an issue.

Music Marketin g#2

Hi guys! So a couple of days ago I uploaded a post about our most recent project: The Music Marketing Project. In this project, we were given a song and we basically had to come up with and represent a brand new artist. We had to make a music video with our given song and explore many concepts relating to distribution and marketing techniques. All the work has been done and submitted so I thought I would go over the process with you all. 

So at the beginning of the process, my group started off pretty slow. It was a really detailed and big project and we were all just a little lost. Once we chose a song, we began by working on case studies. We explored bands that offered music that was really similar to the one we had been assigned. After finding 4 bands that did the job, each group member did a bit of research and we compiled all the information we needed. When all of this was done, we took a different route from most groups. Other groups explored trending marketing and distribution techniques after this. They made it their main focus before expanding on the actual artist. Our group decided to really focus on our artist and who he was before anything else. In doing this, we could use more accurate marketing and distribution techniques that fit his persona. For example, we knew we wanted him to be a small town, family-oriented artist so we set up his marketing so that he could set up a personal connection with his fans and so that he was an artist that did not change themselves for fame. We incorporated marketing into this by really enhancing easy-going social media use, etc.

After really creating our artist, we moved onto the business side of things. We used marketing and distribution techniques that we saw the bands we explored in our case studies used, such as selling physical copies of their music and having personal social media accounts so that the fans feel a more intimate connection with the artist. We had to research trending marketing/distribution techniques, finding reliable and useful things was harder than you'd think. We came up with a demo website for our artist and shared our visions of how it actually would be on it. On this website there was also fake merchandise that we would hope to sell for our artist. 

Once we finished this side of the project, we moved onto the music video. First, we came up with the original plan of it all and based a story board off of it. We planned to make our music video a melancholy video of a heartbroken boy, but, as we got closer to our shooting date, we realized this didn't match the theme of the song nor of the theme we were trying to portray with our artist. The song was all about a boy who was so caught up in a girl and spoke of memories the two had. We didn't want something blue that would get a listener into that big head of theirs, we wanted something with a hint of reminiscence and an overall feel of memories being valued and cherished. So that is what we did, we created a video of a boy reminiscing moments with an ex-lover. At the end however, he continues with his life in a happy manner surrounded by friends.

In the process of making the video, we focused on getting a certain amount of different shots to add some variety. To elevate the quality of the production we practiced many video making techniques, such as  changing clothes in between scenes to distinguish the difference between certain moments. After compiling enough clips of what we needed, I took it home to edit. My group had decided to add some effects to add onto the memory illusion of the video. We also played around with the color scheme and raised the saturation whenever the main character, the boy, was content. 

When presenting our project, we all split the powerpoint up. The powerpoint was mainly made up of bullet points. We did this so we had the freedom to explain most of these bullet points how we felt could be most effective and in our own way. I thought this was very useful and made our presentation that much more effective as it showed that we knew what we were talking about and put the effort and thought into this project.

I really loved this project. To be quite honest, I think it really expanded my knowledge on the marketing and distribution world. Yes, the topics. are very easy to understand and to expand on but having to apply them is a different story, you understand them in a completely different way. I was able to understand why certain artists do certain things such as how they market their music on their social media platforms, etc. Applying our case studies to our overall presentation is also something that will really help me in the Cambridge exam at the end of the year. Applying that knowledge to the overall project and how we wanted to represent our artist showed how useful that information can be if done correctly. 

For all of you guys that are interested, here's the link to our music video (hope you enjoy!): https://youtu.be/cOEGNUDoRkE