Critical Self Reflection [ Component 3 ]

This is the critical self reflection I made for this project

This is my first draft (+ Mr. Nick's feedbacks) link: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13eGbmBkN22o9EOi48paYMYgcJFS6_CoVd2dFWrrBYSg/edit?usp=sharing 

This is my second draft (+Mr. Nick's feedbacks)  link 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n-sATpJVP1BuTFV_YEa3O_l3intAi0-d124ZiiVhQNo/edit?usp=sharing 

This is my final draft link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16lt7Nj1dw_FhFpxH4rTW6WMrbLzV-0FY6cFnNS2Ra3M/edit?usp=sharing

Cambridge gave us a variety of briefs that we could do and the brief I chose was the Music Promotion Package brief because it aligns with my interests and I have a considerable amount of knowledge regarding the music industry. 

The brief stated that I needed to:

“Create a promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music video (major task), together with an official social media page for the band or artiste(s) and a digipak for the album’s release (minor tasks).”

We decided to choose the genre of electropop because it suits our initial vision for our music video. In this project I worked with a partner, Erina. You can find links to her blogs in my blog. 

Cambridge gave us a variety of briefs that we could do and I chose the Music Promotion Package brief because it aligns with my interests and I have a considerable amount of knowledge regarding the music industry. The brief given to me said that I needed to create a promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music video (major task), together with an official social media page for the band or artiste(s) and a digipak for the album’s release (minor tasks). We decided to choose the genre of electropop because it suits our initial vision for our music video. In this project I worked with a partner, Erina. You can find links to her blogs in my blog. 

After a series of discussions with my partner we decided to create a music promotion package for the song “my strange addiction” by Billie Eilish and we created an imaginary artist to be the artist for our promotion package called ‘Eve.’

How do your products represent social groups or issues?

We constructed our music video and its promotion by doing various researches in advance and setting a target audience which are teenagers (around 13-18 years old) specifically female teens. Our music video mainly represents lonely people and teenagers. Our main character follows the stereotype of an introverted high school student that is normally seen in media all over the world. According to Stuart Hall's representation theory, representation in media allows the audience to shape their knowledge and understanding about the character. It makes it easy for them to understand or even relate to our main character, which is our artist, Eve.

We made use of the mise-en-scene in the video to highlight and express Eve’s character so that the audience can understand her easily. In our storyline Eve plays the role of a neurodivergent, lonely highschool student with an enthusiasm in art. We styled Eve with clothes that are commonly seen used by teenagers such as school uniforms, platform boots, short jeans and graphic t-shirts. We also filmed in locations such as school and a female teenager’s room (stereotype shown by the light pink wall, feminine poster designs and dolls) to match our theme and create a sense of youthfulness in our video. We also created props that exhibit her personality and interests such as Eve’s oil painting and Eve’s sketchbook.

First of all we curated objects that were commonly used in the early 2000s as our props. Our props include old electronics such as TV box, handycam, film cameras, digicam, Macbook Pro from the year 2005, ipod and a wired earphone. We also made sure that the fashion items Eve uses in the music video existed back in the days. Doc Marten boots, Nike Air Force 1 sneakers and Casio Baby-G watches are all timeless items that were famous back then and are also famous now. According to Roland Barthes’ 5 Narrative Codes, these are semantic codes (which suggests another additional meaning) that will be decoded by our audiences. For the outfits we mainly used the school uniform to emphasize that the main character is a high school student in order to increase relatableness. Aside from that, the outfits worn by the models are neutral in color to fit the overall vibe of the music video.

Most scenes from our music video are shot in medium shot to let viewers to focus on both the character’s expression and her surroundings. Full shots are mainly used so we have space to integrate our animations. There are some scenes that include zooming in to an object, an example of it from our music video is the scene where the camera zooms in to Eve reading a book in the class. It is intended to dramatise and let viewers focus on a specific focal point. It is also a common technique used in older films.

I edited our video and images to match the vibe of the early 2000s with the editing software Adobe Premiere Pro. I mainly focus on the colour grading of the video. To match the theme of loneliness and neurodivergent, I lower the exposure of the video and set the tone into a cool purple-ish hue. In some clips I also change the aspect ratio into 3:4 and add various effects (such as noise, channel blur and unsharp mask) to recreate old digicam videos. These clips are intended to add the old school feeling to the video and add variety to keep audiences interested. These digicam videos are a form of Eve’s perspective. Audiences are looking at Eve’s point of view through the digicam videos.

In addition, we also created a representation of social issues related to neurodivergent people. This representation was shown through Eve’s imaginations and actions. Neurodivergent describes people whose brains work differently for different reasons. They have different strengths and weaknesses from normal people. In this case, the Eve character is very talented in creative subjects however she’s struggling with her communication skills which has resulted in her creating her imaginary friends instead of socialising in real life. We chose to include this social issue in our project as many individuals are still unaware of the condition which led them to think that neurodivergent is disease. We made use of 2D animations to convey Eve’s mental condition as a separation between the real world and the world Eve has in her head. Props such as Eve’s corkboard, sketchbook and painting are visual representations of Eve’s imagination. Eve’s real world and imaginary world can be considered as Levi Strauss’ binary opposites. In accord with Barthes’ theory, the 2D animation is a symbolic code which connotes meanings to two different sides of the binary opposites. 

The representations in our music video are neither negative nor positive. It aims to act as a display to spread awareness concerning neurotypical actions to the public and to provide relatable representations for neurodivergent audiences. Conforming to the Theory of Stardom, ‘ordinariness’ is one of the factors why audiences are interested in Eve. Richard Dyer believes that audiences like to see them doing routine things that are similar to us. We like it when we feel like they're relatable to us.

The track “my strange addiction” by Billie Eilish includes some sampled audios from the American sitcom, The Office. This is an Intertextuality, which is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. It serves a purpose to make the scenes familiar and more interesting to watch for audiences with previous knowledge of The Office.

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

In this project we focus on the setting of the early 2000s. We featured various mise-en-scene to create a setting that looks similar to it. We chose the theme of the early 2000s because trends go through a cycle, where new trends come and go. It's known as the 20 year rule, which refers to the time it takes for a trend to die and come back into the spotlight. In recent years the theme of Y2K (Year 2000) has been emerging back and because of that, we decided to go with a theme that is trending amongst teenagers nowadays in order to catch the attention of our target audiences.

To create a sense of branding between different media I decided on visual elements that can act as a key descriptor to our brand identity. Our digipak, music video and social media includes common media languages that are portrayed through specific fonts, colours and mise en scene. We decided to use the colour violet as it connotes creativity, imagination and dreams which are messages our artist wants to convey. Violet and other shades of purples are also considered as a cool color and a feminine color which is very fitting to our target audience and theme of loneliness. I created a logo for my artist with the font “alagard,” an 8-bit font which is usually found in video games from the 90s. We included the “Eve” logo in our digipak and instagram posts to let the audience identify our artist easily. I designed a title card for the music video intro with a script font (“aloja”). I chose the font as handwritten to have a feeling of femininity and it seems more personal. I made use of the title card design for the promotional posts on Instagram. Other than that, for subtitles in any of the designs I created, I used the same font which is a sans serif font, LEMON MILK.

We purposely avoided warm colored objects and backgrounds on any of our clips to keep them consistent. We took all of the promotional and digipak pictures with a film photo filter using the mobile application NOMO CAM. 

How do your products engage with the audience?

With the help of technological convergence we are able to digitally promote our artist through social media. We created an Instagram account to reach new audiences and inform our existing audiences of new updates regarding our artist. Following the trends in this new media age, we decided to use Instagram as our main social media platform to mass communicate with audiences and YouTube as a platform to release our music video. According to extension.umn.edu, in the United States, YouTube has become the most popular social media platform with 85 percent of 13 to 17 year olds using it and 72 percent for Instagram.

I planned a 3 week marketing campaign for our artist. The campaign started with a “coming soon” banner to let fans know that Eve is going to release new music. Although Eve is famous for being an art enthusiast we created an art contest to give a chance for our audience to participate directly in the making of the music video and build a face-to-face interaction with the chosen winner. This will also boost Eve’s reputation as she may be seen as ‘down-to-earth.’ I also designed a schedule poster to help fans keep track of when each content is going to be released. We decided to release 2 versions of teaser images which will help build anticipation amongst Eve’s fans and give them an idea of what the music video and album would look like. We posted a series of behind the scenes clips and images to make the audience feel like they’re included in the making process of the album. Among those posts we also introduced our guest actor who will be appearing in our music video to boost the views and engagements. Throughout the 3 weeks I provided daily contents of sneak peeks of the music video or digipak to keep audiences engaged. I dropped the music video teaser as a visual tool to get fans excited for the upcoming music video. The music video teaser introduces the setting in the music video and includes a snippet of the song. The short clips on the teaser can act as a proairetic code that builds suspense on the audience by leaving a clue that something is gonna happen next.

Since the ‘my strange addiction’ album is related to the topic of neurodivergent, we attempt to spread awareness by giving an explanation about the condition through our Instagram post caption and giving them a link to a website about neurodivergent.

Towards the end of the marketing campaign we announced Eve Indonesia Tour through an instagram post. We then posted some more details about the tour such as the seating plan and ticketing details. Touring means that the artist can reach an extended fan base since it gives fans a chance to watch Eve perform live. It also helps to maintain the loyalty of fans since it gives them a sense of loyalty after meeting the artist in real life.

We also build interactions with our followers by using various instagram features. The comment section and direct message in Instagram allows followers to comment and give feedback on our contents. We build interaction through instagram stories using various features. We provided a poll in our story to let our audience vote on their favorite album cover to build prosumerism. We attached the links to our artist’s website in our bio and instagram story to make it easy for our followers to find our website. We attached clickable stickers and Spotify Code (QR codes specifically used for spotify) in our Instagram that lead our followers to Eve’s spotify page.

We included a lyric book including lyrics of the tracks and inside of our digipak to let fans sing along to the album. In addition we put exclusive photos of Eve inside the lyric book as a fan service.

We also promoted our digipak and merchandise through Instagram by posting mockups of them in Instagram stories and attaching the link on our post and bio.

The Instagram business account setting has allowed us to monitor our audiences’ response by providing us a graph of our follower’s activity and the number of new accounts we have reached per week.

How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

As stated by Steve Neale a text must conform to the conventions enough to be recognizable, yet subvert them enough to be different and interesting. I did research on music videos that are currently famous amongst our target audiences. Most of them include a main character that is around their age that they can look up to as an inspiration (either morally or by their fashion style). According to Blumler and Katz’s uses and gratification theory, teenagers mainly watch music videos to satisfy their base needs of personal identity, social relationships and diversion rather than as a surveillance. Therefore, we plan to create a music video that supplies them with characters that can both entertain them and act as role models. We conform to the conventions of pop music videos by including a main character (Eve) that acts as a role model. However we also subvert from the genre conventions. Usually pop music videos would include close up shots that focus on the artist’s face while in our music video, Eve’s face can’t be seen most of the time. Pop music videos are also colorful and vibrant most of the time, on the other hand our music video is dull and muted.

We took inspiration from New Jeans’s “Ditto” music video which also includes an old school theme. We were also inspired by HUH YUNJIN’s  'I ≠ DOLL' music video for the inclusion of 2D animations. We took references from NCT Dream’s social media to build our social media campaign.