Music Video Project

In this blog, I have attached my second AICE Media Studies Project, a music video. I was assigned to create a music video that is about a minute long. For this project, I grouped up with one other person who was also in my group for the commercial project. I could choose to make a video to any song, within reason. I discussed with my group-mate a few songs and we decide on a song titled, "Honey," by Kehlani. We narrowed it down to this song because it has LGBT+ representation. The lack of LGBT+ representation is an important issue to us, so we felt that making a music video to this song would help increase the amount of representation the community gets.

This project was very different from the commercial. For starters, I had a lot more time to plan, film, and edit. The length of the video was longer and I got to film outside of school. Since I was able to film outside of school, I decided the best location for the video would be at a park because, in the video, two girls would be having a picnic together. To plan for this video, I watched a variety of music videos to get an understanding of what they look like and to figure out the conventions.

My main roles for this video were the same roles I had doing the commercial. I was a researcher, camerawoman, director, and editor. Furthermore, I gained a role as a storyboard artist. I was in charge of drawing all the pictures for the storyboard. As a researcher, I simply just watched videos and took notes. As a storyboard artist, I learned what details needed to be included in the drawings. Storyboarding was an interesting experience, especially because it was my first time drawing one and I love to draw. When I was drawing, I made sure I drew the actresses where I wanted them to be in a scene and what props I wanted in the shot. As the camerawoman, I filmed each scene using a variety of angles and shots, so I would have a lot to work with when I edited. I would also inform the actresses if they were out of frame. As one of the directors, I directed the actresses on how they should act in the scene. For example, I would tell them to smile and act happy. As the editor, I was in charge of dumping the footage from the SD card and importing it onto Pinnacle Studio, an editing software. When all the footage was imported, I arranged the footage in the correct order and cut them to my desired length. I also changed some of the lighting in the video to add to the story. When I finished editing, I exported the music video.

After I was finished with the music video, I realized that I learned a lot from creating this video. Overall, I was able to better my production skills. This was only the second film I had ever created and I was extremely happy with it. I believe that I had improved a lot since the commercial project.