Creative Critical Reflection - Music Video

1. How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues?

    Our group's product challenges conventions in many ways. At face value, the music video looks like an all-around happy, carefree, upbeat music video. The assumptions are happy. However, once you begin examining the video, you will see that not everything is so happy. Characters can be observed hiding themselves under an umbrella and then revealing themselves and dancing. This also represents the social issue of depression and mental health. We tried to push the notion that you never truly know what someone is going through in their head. While people may show themselves as happy online or in public, you never know what is going on in their private life. It was definitely a good hidden message. Even though the music is upbeat, bright, and happy, there is always that hidden message that the characters might not feel the same way as how they present themselves. This makes the music video perfect. It gives the music video replay ability. At first, someone might look at it as all the characters being happy but then when they watch it the second time, they notice that there might be a different story. But regardless of how you look at it, it is particularly important that we check in on our loved ones and make sure they are feeling okay. Mental health awareness is an especially important thing for people, and it needs to be a more common thing in today's world.

2. How does your product engage with audiences AND how would it be distributed as a real media text?

    Our problem engages with audiences by bringing attention to mental health and showing the true emotions that someone might be feeling and trying to make them happy. At first glance, the song "Happy" by Pharrell is just any other upbeat, happy song. But it actually tells a story. It connects with people in a way that relates to everyone. The blend of upbeat danceing and feel good lyrics just makes people happy. Dancing is represented as a generally happy activity so that's how Pharrell makes it relatable. However, we decided to make our own take on how the video can be conceived. We wanted to connect with people's emotions. People might feel sad a lot of the time, which could be represented by the sad people under the umbrellas, but suddenly feel happy once they do things they enjoy, which could be the dancing characters. It also represents mental health awareness, which I explained in the first question. Pretty much, our product can relate to the general audience in many different ways and we had intent on doing that. It depends on the person in the way they decide to interpret. This could be digitally distributed as real media text to a wide array of audiences as it relates to a lot of people. We made this video in a way that can be relatable to a lot of people, so it is a good message that could be spread to a lot of people on the internet. This could be spread on platforms like, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or any media platform that can share a video. It was meant to be shared to people and be consumed for the good.

3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

    Our productions skills got better throughout this project. There were a lot of questions as we began the project, I had pretty much decided Thomas and Angel as partners after 1 conversation we had. We had no clue what we were going to do and selected our Song pretty much the day before the deadline. But then we made a plan, stuck with it, and pulled it off. With filming, we knew the terminology of the filming angles, shots, and all of that but we weren't really experienced as videographers. So, we decided to kind of wing it and film the shots we planned out until we got a product that we felt comfortable with. During this project, I became more familiar with the job of a videographer/cameraman. I understood that the actor did the acting, and that the editor put the video together using the shots that the camera. I knew this because I'd been an actor and editor in my past project, but I had not been a cameraman. In this project I had to do a little bit of all three. I learned a lot being a cameraman. It's easy up until you are trying to film a particular angle and you have to find a place up high in order to film a high angle or a place down low in order to film a low angle. It's hard to do that. Being a cameraman also involves hand stability, you don't want a shakey video and that's hard to do when you are moving around while holding the camera. Other than the cameraman, I also learned a lot with time management skills. This is not a project you can put to the side. You need to space this out or else you will be doing everything at the last minute like we did. I learned a lot during the process and I think our skills have developed really spectacularly.

4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

    Our group integrated a few technologies, software, and hardware. To film, we used the iPhone. Not only did we gather every single one of our clips using it, we also used it to send the clips over to the computer which brings me to the second form of hardware that we used. We used a computer to edit, on the computer we used software called iMovie, Apple Music, and iMessage, all three of these software applications were used for editing. iMessage was used to send over the videos shot from the phone to the computer where iMovie put the clips and the music together. We got the Music off of Apple Music where I had used a Free Trial subscription to obtain the music. The last integration of technology was Google Maps. We used Google Maps to find our location of filming. We were able to use Google Street view to figure out how much space we had and how many things were nearby. After observing the location, we picked the best one we saw. Overall, we used 2 pieces of hardware (iPhone, Computer), 3 software applications (Apple Music, iMessage, iMovie), and we used 1 online resource (Google/Google Maps.)