1. The most common convention was the actor lip-syncing to the to the lyrics during all or most of the music video. However for us lip-syncing did not align with the section of the song we chose to use. We also told a story which is a consistent convention within the genre, majority of these have ambiguous endings, similar to our video. This was because the major event had happened. What was filmed was one piece of the puzzle. What followed was left to the viewer as the question 'are we still friends' was proposed. If was the resolution of the video even though it did tie up all the loose ends. This allows the views to form their own conclusions about the relationship of the friends after the music video has ended.
Our video deals with a social issue, though it is not very major. The issue being represented is the relationship between friends and their love life, and how people lose friends every day because of their poor actions. The more serious side to our video is the aspect of people murdering each other. Although it may not seem like an important or often occurring. One of the most common reasons for murder is jealousy, something that is represented in the video as the girl kills her friend, jealous and upset that she got with her "boyfriend". This problem doesn't fully fall into social, but still can be tied into it. This is because murder -- obviously -- is a chargeable offense and against the law. However, cheating is a moral issue. People react in many different ways to cheating or when their cheated on. In our video, the girl who got cheated on takes her anger out on her friend, in a spontaneous way. Immediately after, she regrets it. This accurately reflects how people react to similar situations in real life, because people often over-react when they are overcome with strong negative emotions.
2. Our product engages with our audience by re-enacting real world situations; however, in some parts, we chose to over dramatize, for entertainment. For example, we chose to over-dramatize the girl's reaction to getting cheated on, to make the video have more suspense. Our audience is directed to teens, because our story mostly occurs around that time in people's lives. We also wanted the video to closely represent a teenager's love life because we felt that it is also when people are most emotional, and act on their emotions the most. Our video is special because it takes a sensitive and, in most cases, sad situation and adds some suspense and action into it. If this were a professional video, I would choose to upload it on both TikTok and YouTube. This is because TikTok is known for short, but entertaining and humorous videos. I also have the most experience with uploading and/or imbed videos from other sources into TikTok. YouTube has a wide-spread audience, which would hopefully increase our views. Additionally, we want our video to reach teenagers, and the app that most of them have, is TikTok.
3. My production skills developed in many ways. The biggest development I noticed was my decision-making skills, and creativity. Before going into this project, I didn't explore the different types of editing, or camera angles that I could've. I had a straight-forward mindset and had little to no thought process for decision-making. However, by the end of this project, I learned a lot; not only about different camera angles, but also which one could be best in certain scenes and why. I learned to ask myself important questions that I didn't before. Whether it was 'Which camera angle would best fit the mood I want to suggest?' or 'How should this scene be edited to better fit the music' I saw growth in my overall filming skills.
Additionally, our decision-making as a group about the video was constantly being developed. I noticed that as time went on, and the more we worked on the video, we were able to talk about our video in greater detail, like certain facial expressions and how they can show what the character is feeling. Or how our camera was set up, the setting in our scenes, and where exactly we should be, etc. In a similar way to how I was asking questions to myself, we were asking questions to each other. Every time we met up, I noticed how we able to better communicate to each other. We also felt more comfortable re-filming scenes that we didn't like the first time. I think this is because we understood more what we wanted exactly for each scene and wanted to get it exact.
4. For filming, we stuck to one of my groupmate's phones. We decided to do this for many reasons. The first, and most important, is that we already had a well enough experience with filming on a phone. Filming using another device, for example, a professional camera, or other camera in general would have taken a lot of time to figure out. We also had experience embedding past videos into CapCut, and editing from there. If we were to use a different camera then a phone, then we would first have to learn how to film from the camera, then how to upload the video to our editing app.
Our editing app was CapCut. For a similar reason, we specifically chose this app over other ones because it's an app that me and the rest of my groupmates have used before, and all feel very comfortable using. Because we all used the same editing app before, we came to the conclusion that there is no need to use a different one, I specifically already know how to use the effects, how to clip and move scenes around, and other details of the app. If we were to use something else, then it would take extra time to re-learn things that we already know hot to do on a different app, and it would just be repetitive and overall, not smart.
Link to GoogleDoc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14gZupWJ_dP_JznmmKp7nG9A9o6mqD8QliuapVURNgJw/edit?usp=sharing
