This is my weekly progress for my music video project that will details what I have done throughout the week. This report will aid in reflecting on my progress and acts as a plan for the following weeks.
Because I prefer writing my weekly recap as a complete paragraph, it is a bit difficult to identify the problems that had occured. Thus, I've decided my method would be to highlighted the problems in red and provide the possible solutions below.
┏━━✦ FIRST PHASE - RESEARCH AND PLANNING ✦━━┓
✧*̥˚ Week 1 *̥˚✧
Recap:
In this first week of the project, my teacher had gone through the brief. Truthfully, I became extremely nervous hearing that we had to make our own music video as it seemed there were a lot of tasks to complete. However, I did try to be excited it for this project as it will be a new experience for me. We began by discussing on the team and how my classmates and I will be grouped which proved to be a stressful situation as it was difficult to please everyone's ideal grouping. After this, we moved towards doing a small preliminary reasearch on different genres of music videos. I found this task to be slightly confusing as I feel as though music videos aren't as prominent and popularly watched in todays era so I felt as though I wasn't too familiar on the conventions of a music video of more recent times.
Possible Solutions:
Since I am currently not too familiar with the conventions of music videos, I will have to face outside my comfort zone to the world of cinematography and conduct extra research on conventions that appear frequently in music videos.
To do List :
Finalising my grouping is the top priority. This will then be followed by beginning my research on conventions as the next step in my plan.
✧*̥˚ Week 2 *̥˚✧
Recap: This week my team was finalised with the help of our teacher. I'm quite pleased with my grouping as they are all friends I can trust. With the grouping fixed, we choose the genre Indie Pop as we all had initially agreed to do pop however after I expressed my concern on the high budget that the genre often requires, we adjusted it to our capabilities by leaning into the Indie genre (that often excuses the low budget/equipment in the filmset). Moving on, we started researching into mutliple aspects of music videos such as the industry, genre research, and conventions of our genre. This was all such hefty yet essential tasks to be done so I did my best to ensure my research indepth and thorough.
Possible Solutions:
This uneventful week meant for a lack of problems to be solved, thankfully.
To do List :
I aim to simply complete my research by the end of next week.
✧*̥˚ Week 3 *̥˚✧
Recap: This week was pretty dull as we simply continued our research however, our teacher gave us a warning that we will be starting our planning by next week so it is a must to complete my reasearch by this week. The deadline was a bit scary since I had other tasks from extracurriculars. This week, I looked further into music videos of my genre to better understand the style that they share/have in common. Although I tend to find research boring, I quite enjoyed this task as it mostly meant listening to the type of music I liked which served as my motivation. My team and I also took on to discussing what music we wanted to do by suggesting the songs we enjoyed, picturing the visuals of the music video and then conducting a process of elimination to narrow our choices down.
Possible Solutions:
Because of how time-management is crucial at this time, I've begun setting up reminders on my device to make sure I don't let this task slip away from my mind that easily and am able to keep myself accountable.
To do List :
This week, it is a priority for my research to be complete as it will be graded by my teacher. As well as building a foundation of my team and I's music video by finalising our song choice and having the basic ideas on what will our music video look like.
✧*̥˚ Week 4 *̥˚✧
Recap: On this week, me and my team started and completed our statement of intent which ended up being finished faster than I expected. Since everything went smoothly and we had already went through the questions together, we were able to mostly complete it within a single day and only had to polish it at home. Other than that, we began learning about the theory of stardom which helped us in understanding how to create our star persona within our statement of intent.
Possible Solutions:
This week I encountered no big, notable issues that would require any solutions. However, I simply need to get most of my blogposts finished/completed as the deadline is nearing, so I will be more proactive in this aspect by this week.
To do List : Since we are getting started in the storyboarding next week, I plan to listen to the song we choose (catch me in the air by rina sawayama) and jot down ideas for the visuals of the song.
✧*̥˚ Week 5 *̥˚✧
Recap: This week we began the storyboarding process of the project by starting from the lyric sheet. This task was a bit difficult since me and my teammates had not prepared/had a fixed narrative to follow so we spent most of our time building on ideas, continously suggesting our ideas until we settled to one complete idea. After that we created our moodboard to make sure our visions aligned for our project then drew out a small detailed section our storyboard before moving on to discussion about next week. The class had ended faster than I expected so my team and I ran out of time to have an indepth understanding of the plot and would have to continue it on our own time.
Possible Solutions:
By this point in the week, we were beginning to lose track of time and be reckless with how we spent it as we all were dealing with stressful mix of exams. I took on the task to complete the lyric sheet at home to ease my teammates burden so I had taken notes on our discussion home and simply expanded them to more fleshed out ideas.
To do List : Continue lyric sheet and propose the idea to my teammates to then move on to storyboard by the end of week 6
✧*̥˚ Week 6 *̥˚✧
Recap: This week we had a full week to work on our project, which included recap our learning of technical elements and theories, song research and a class screen test directed by our teacher. This was planned to be completed within the same week so I moved on to polishing or adding to my other blogs (such as more research or a self-reflection. However, this task was not as swift as I wished it was as it took quite a while to research technical elements and go through each one of the blogs to complete their content and or reflection.
Possible Solutions:
Because of how much time this classwork is demanding, I had decided to set aside atleast an hour of my day to adding to the blog inorder to get it done by the submission date. I hope that this method will help in eliminating accumulated stress as my semestral examinations are also nearing
To do List : Complete all blogs that my teacher has assigned as it will be graded by the end of next week.
✧*̥˚ Week 7 *̥˚✧
Recap: This is our final week to do our project for this term before we move on to the production phase. My group and I used our last class session to ask our teacher for feedback on the lyricsheet and plan. He suggested we tweak the storyline so it could have a more coherent and clear narrative that is more within our capabilities. Our group agreed to change it so we will be altering it before our filming begins. This poses as a slight problem however since we plan to begin filming on December thus we need to get this done as soon as possible
Possible Solutions:
I'll be finising the storyboard before my semester break begins by keeping my minimum an hour dedicated to completing unfinished task and adding towards the lyric sheet and storyboard.
To do List : Focus on semestral examinations first and foremost before moving on to ending the pre-production phase and move towards the actual production phase
Reflection: This is a checklist my teacher provided which helped me narrow down what I had finished and what is needed to be done. As of writing (13 Nov), most of my blogs are complete with only some that require a little more tweaking before being checked off. The checklist was very helpful as it kept me on track and I was able to hold notes in which I can come back to. Overall, the weekly progress is not a fun task to do each and every week however after revisiting it, I understand it is essential in keeping yourself accountable and responsible on following the schedule provided. I could have utilised it more to be the most effecient by providing more detail on my to-do list.
┏━━✦ SECOND PHASE - POST PRODUCTION AND FINALISING✦━━┓
In addition to the red and green highlights, I added a light purple for the lessons I've learnt through reflecting on the challenges and solutions of that week.
✧*̥˚ Week 1 *̥˚✧
Recap: This is the start of a new semester so I will be returning to week 1 in my weekly progress. To start off our first class of the new year, we first began with a small practical work where we made a mini video music as a class. Each group was given a verse of the song 'Here Comes the Sun' by the Beatles. My team of 4 (added a friend that was not in a group) got 2 verses that were a part of the chorus. Because we only had a limited time to do this, my group decided to split into 2 for the storyboarding process but shared a star for both videos which might of slowed our filming process down. This led to an uneven allocation of time for both videos as one video took longer than the other, which contributed to the low quality of the second video. On this week, I did miss a class however it seemed to be a theory class and I wasn't given any extra work to catch up on by my teacher
Possible Solutions :
Despite being an unserious task, this practical work had taught me the importance of proper and even distribution of tasks to be able to complete a project so I learnt to be more communicative with my team members to reduce miscommunications and delays.
To do List : Currently, nothing to do for next week.
✧*̥˚ Week 2 *̥˚✧
Recap: This week my teacher introduced the multi-cam editing technique to my class. To practice our understanding, we did an activity where we made a circle around a subject and filmed different angles of the subject moving (in our case, the subject had danced.) I found this activity to be fun and silly to work on and generally had little trouble during the production of the activity. I had struggled a bit on syncing the videos together since I wasn't too familiar with how to see the soundwaves in Capcut and we had no clapboard so it took a little bit of time to do it however was overall an enjoyable task. Other than that, our teacher reminded us to update our filming schedule in the case we had filmed anything in our holiday.
Possible Solutions :
To sync the videos, I simply used visual indicators and matched it up to the best of my abilities by watching the footages frame by frame. Looking up a tutorial could have helped but since my teacher had given us about 20 minutes to edit the video, I was worried I would not have the time to watch a video and execute it perfectly.
To do List : Update the filming schedule on my own time and film scenes that hasn't been completed.
✧*̥˚ Week 3 *̥˚✧
Recap: On this week, our teacher had discussed about doing more research for our project, which included starting on our other media products than the music video. The research and development he tasked us to do was the on branding, social media, and digipak. My team and I decided to split the tasks; Cheryl worked on branding, I had worked on social media, and Aurel worked on the digipak. I found the social media research to be quite tiring because it required me to look into multiple websites and compare them but it was extremely helpful for me to make a convincing and engaging social media page for my artist. To help with creating our brand and visual identity for our artist, our teacher had given us an activity to make a mindmap to discuss our actor's persona, social media presence, long term goals, audience and how they would form connections/interact with each other and the artist. I did feel as though there was so much for my team and I to discuss for this mindmap but unfortunately was cut off by the limited time we had for our class on that day. This meant the continuation of the brainstorming had to be done at home where communication is less direct/face-to-face since we relied on texting as our main form of communication outside of school. This mindmap did help by acting as a guide that all of my team members can follow to ensure we were on the same page and the branding was consistent across all social media platforms.
Possible Solutions :
My team and I did attempt to communicate via voice call rather than texts so our messages will be heard directly but it was an issue of personal time since we were all busy/had different schedules that clashed which made it hard and inconvenient to gather together. Thus, we stuck to talking during school hours or chatting through our groupchat for any important news.
To do List : I have to finish my social media research on 3 artists so I can move on to the development
✧*̥˚ Week 4 *̥˚✧
Recap: Unfortunately, this week we only had 1 media class as the rest of the week was taken by public holidays. Our teacher did task us in creating a blog to explain the file organisation in our team and the behind-the-scenes of the production process. During the holiday, I continued my social media research on different artists which I found extremely interesting as I got to learn how different artists appeal to their target audience using different social medias. During this time, I also continued editing by beginning to compile all the footages into one as well as writing my editing process
Possible Solutions :
This week was fortunately clear of any problems from media. I did feel as though I did not pay much mind to media on this week since I had mock tests for other subject, which might have negatively affected and slowed my progress on editing. I could have allocated a fair amount of time to work on the project so that the work would not pile up by the end of the project.
To do List : Continue editing to be able to finish our very first draft to be given to our audience for a feedback session next week
✧*̥˚ Week 5 *̥˚✧
Recap: This week I was absent from school for a bit because I had caught a flu, meaning I could have missed on very important lessons. My team did update me on the task given on this day through our groupchat. I was informed that they made a Google Form for our targeted audience to give us feedback regarding the draft of our music video and digipak in order to know the good and bad of our media products. We were told to collect about 4 responses but ended with 7 responses (including our teacher's comments) where we could learn from their feedback to improve the storyline and visuals. Most comments from our teacher was in regards to the editing while the google form respondents were more helpful with the other media products
Possible Solutions :
Having confidence in my team and trusting them to deliver any important lessons was the only thing I could do at the moment since I cannot attend school however I am sure to reach out to my teacher to ensure I hadn't missed out from anything in class once I am able to attend again.
To do List : Gathering respondents is our next move so I plan to send my video to friends and ask them to fill our the form if they're available or simply tell me their thoughts directly
✧*̥˚ Week 6 *̥˚✧
Recap: This week, school was closed due to bad weather so our teacher help us start on our critical reflection by providing us a planning template to answer the 4 main questions as well as giving comments to improve our CR answers. My team had also completed screen test blog and collected useful data and feedback to improve our media products. However, there was a big issue with the screen test responses being lengthy. Although it was detailed and indepth, it got tiring to read through all of them.
Possible Solutions :
To save a little time, I ended up skimming all the responses and writing the most frequent issues that our audiences experiences which was mostly the representations that we intended to show were not clear. As stated on the blog, because of this issue arising, we decided to focus more on the representation that was obvious and build on that rather than confuse our audience with too many vague representations. This audience feedback was helpful in deciding our next move as a group.
To do List : In this week, my main priority is to plan for some reshooting certain scenes that were criticised or required some evaluation. Additionally, to continue editing the music video to be satisfactory.
✧*̥˚ Week 7 *̥˚✧
Recap: During this week, I was bombarded with mock exams which really strained the amount of time I had to work on my project. My senior camping trip was also a contributor to taking away the free time I had so not much progress was made during this week. This week I had mostly worked on writing the blogs and completing them (such as the post production editing, social media development and others).
Possible Solutions:
I was made aware of our camping trip and could have prepared for this beforehand by doing extra work to completing bits of my projects by spending at least an hour of everyday to work on it. I realised I was prioritizing more urgent subjects, projects and my wellbeing so I am not too harsh on my lack of progress this week. However, there needs to be a change in my scheduling so I will definitely be attempting to spare atleast an hour (like the previous term) on this project everyday.
To do List : Add to more content and detail to my CR, begin development of social media and continue with the editing and the process blog.
✧*̥˚ Week 8*̥˚✧
Recap: This week I wanted to focus on social media development since I felt as though I might have been neglecting it too much. I had prepared some ideas and sketches and presented them to my teammates to gather any comments and feedback. I asked Cheryl to help me out on the social media developments so we worked together to create and share ideas, take pictures, come up with engagement tactics, etc. The only prominent issue was definitely regarding time since I am balancing around 4 test from 4 subjects in a week in addition to 2 projects.
Possible Solutions:
I tried to allocate as much of my free time to doing media by doing some blogs on leisurely time like car rides to school and home, I think this did help in getting more things done however I felt extremely fatigued because all my free time was spent on media and I felt like I didn't get a break. This was definitely a lesson to have prepared better before the upcoming deadline.
To do List : Starting my CCR plan is whats on my priority other than finishing the editing.
✧*̥˚ Week 9 *̥˚✧
Recap: This week was packed with mock exams, so I had spent a lot of time on that rather than on editing unfortunately. In spite of that, Me and Cheryl has been making progress on social media developments and I'm at the final stretch for editing as I got my last few feedbacks from my teacher. No new major issue came up, only the same issue of time.
Possible Solutions:
Using the same tactic I implemented last week, I took any free time I had to work on a bit of my media by, slowly but surely, adding to my CCR.
To do List : Completing CCR essay, finalise the music video and uploading it online.
✧*̥˚ Week 10 *̥˚✧
Recap: The final due date was on the wednesday of this week. I spent lots of time cleaning up my blog and finishing on my CCR, uploading files like music videos, etc. Other than that, there was not much else to comment on for this week.
To do List : Rest well
Self Reflection: This marks the end of my component 3 project for media. Looking back at all my weekly progress made me realised I should have seen the signs of procrastination and been more prepared before the final deadline came. Tracking my progress was never my favourite part of the project but I understand it's a necessary task to compare my working pace to the schedule. I truthfully did not pay much mind to this task and would simply jot down notes rather than write the whole reflection in a span of 5minutes in class, which I found to work for me. However I suspect that my lack of attention to this blog could have been the reason I took the deadline of the project too lightly and procastinated on it.