CCR
How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues?
Our rock music video efficiently uses various conventions in order to represent different social groups. Through edgy visuals, upbeat performance, and random clips to tie everything together, rock music videos capture the audience's attention by inserting silly clips of random things while sometimes spreading important messages. This genre of music is typically more edgy and dark than others, and we tried our best to use these conventions in our music video. We dressed in darker and grungier clothes than usual: consisting of ripped jeans, band t-shirts, and a lot of dark, smudged eyeliner. We took inspiration from the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s music video of “Can’t Stop,” where we placed Samantha on a chair and had her twirl her legs while playing guitar. We added silly little clips of us making funny faces or doing random activities to release tension and make the video more enjoyable to watch. By using some intense visuals and powerful storytelling, whether it be the lyrics of the song or the storyline in the video, rock music videos create an abundance of representation for different communities and social issues. We tried our absolute best to replicate this by telling the story of a breakup which is something many people have gone through. When you care dearly about someone, and they disappear in a flash, it can be ridiculously hard on a person which can cause them to fall into a deep depression. Our music video portrays depression and how difficult it may be to do basic things such as wake up and eat breakfast. This allows diverse groups of people to view our video and feel touched by what we are trying to represent.
How does your product engage with audiences AND how would it be distributed as a real media text?
Our product is based around the story of a breakup, which is something that many teenagers and young adults can find either relatable or interesting. Love stories, especially breakup stories, are quite a common trope that most people enjoy. Psychologically, breakup stories are more enticing than regular love stories since they build suspense about how the person is going to handle the abundance of pain. The audience is appealed to know more, whether it is about what happened that caused the actor to get to this point in their life, or how the story is going to conclude. Another reason that our product engages with the audience is because of a widely known internet meme about the band that wrote the song we used. One of Weezer’s very first singles that launched them into mainstream success is a song titled “Buddy Holly.” Recently, the guitar solo at the end of this song that separates the bridge from the final chorus has become an immensely popular meme among teenagers for whatever reason. Knowing that this band is now a well-known meme, teenagers may find our music video appealing. If this were a professional music video, we would promote it on every short video app possible including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and even X, formerly known as Twitter. By promoting our video, audiences could view short and alluring footage from our video that could make them interested and be present for the official release. We would release the video of YouTube, since it is the most popular video uploading website since it was first released in 2005.
How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
My production skills definitely developed throughout this project. I had never been to a recording studio before, and I could not have asked for a better first time. It was also my first time playing a real drum set! I’ve only ever played electrics, not acoustics. Samantha’s dad taught me everything I needed to know about how to set it up. He showed me how to position my chair correctly and how to adjust the speakers on certain toms so that they are more accentuated than others. The tone sounded so crisp and clean, and I was so happy to be able to learn how to do that hopefully for the future. Everyone learned new things there, whether it be how to adjust the mixer to make the song louder or how to untangle cables, so you don’t trip over them. Not only did I learn a lot about the instruments, but also about editing and the technology behind our project. Samantha was the expert when it came to editing and anything computer related. She taught us how to adjust the volume on certain clips by cutting them into .1 second clips and adjusting the volume on each one so it seems as if the volume is gradually increasing. She also taught us that if you put a short clip over a longer clip, it immediately switches over to the shorter clip so that you do not have to manually edit each and every clip to fit perfectly with the song.
How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?
To film our music video, we decided to use Samantha’s phone. We agreed on her phone because she had the one with the best camera, an iPhone 14. We filmed everything in the highest quality possible horizontally so it could all be high definition and even. We believe that filming our music video on a phone would be better than filming it with a camera. For starters, none of us owned a camera with a lot of storage for videography and getting one would be far too expensive. We also believe that with a phone, it would be much easier to film everything since it is smaller and easier to maintain. We know how to download videos from a phone onto a computer, so filming with a phone was our best option. To edit our music video, we used iMovie. Even though we all used CapCut to create our commercial, we believe that iMovie would be a better option to edit our music video since it is more professional than CapCut and has a wider variety of options. Samantha has a lot of experience with iMovie since when she was younger, she had a small YouTube channel. Her experience was a big advantage because Lilly, Isaac, and I have no idea how to edit. We use our phones and computers to upload everything to Blogger, and we found Blogger to be the best option for writing our blogs because it comes linked to every Google account, so it was rather convenient.
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