A Level Media Studies Component 3 : Final Project

This blog post, written by me (Beatrice), features the music video, digipak, and social media page.

Music Video

Here is the *LINK* incase the video is removed from YouTube

Digipak

FRONT COVER

INSIDE

BACK COVER

Mock-up (credits to Rachelle). Here is the *LINK* incase the image doesn't load 

Social Media

Here is the link to our live social media page. https://www.instagram.com/tunesofaflower/

Interaction with fans/audience (1) on this post.

Interaction with fans/audience (2) on this post

(The interaction indicates that while she frequently likes fans' comments, she only occasionally replies. This can suggests that she acknowledges and appreciates her fans but may not always have the time to engage in deeper conversations.)

Comp 3 : Critical Self Reflection

 Here is my critical self reflection for this music video project. This blog post is written by me (Beatrice).

According to the brief set by Cambridge, students are required to create a music promotion package, which included a music video, social media page, and digipak. Our team decided to cover Billie Eilish's song called "Birds of a Feather" that falls under the indie-pop genre. We also decided to create a fictional indie pop artist named Jasmine, alongside her feature in the song, Viola. We've decided that these two stars will be artists that has a similar genre and target audience, so they'll be able to work with each other better. 

Branding in the media refers to the way a media product establishes a clear and recognizable identity across different platforms by using consistent themes, aesthetics, and messages to create a strong connection with the audience. According to Stuart Hall's Reception theory, branding helps encode meaning that audiences can associate with the artist through all forms of media, being able to receive the star's preferred meaning. Our branding remains consistent by featuring Jasmine's artwork across all of our products. (Fig 1.0) from the music video, (Fig 1.1) digipak, and (Fig 1.2) social media page. This encodes our star as creative and fun. Moreover, posting these on her social media page gives the impression our star is still just an ordinary person, making her feel more relatable, which conforms to the convention of indie pop artist's personality. Richard Dyer's Stardom theory states that stars are constructed by the media, rather than real people, so we've carefully constructed Jasmine's REEL persona by prioritizing personal over promotional contents in Jasmine's social media to make her appear more down-to-earth (Fig 1.4). Even in professional posts, our captioning remains consistent in maintaining Jasmine’s youthful and relatable brand identity. This is achieved through using informal language, emojis, direct mode of address, and a lowercase writing style, mirroring how teenagers typically communicate online. Since our target audience consists of teenagers and young adults aged 16 - 22, these choices enhances Jasmine’s authenticity and appeal.

To make sure that we understand the genre conventions of the genre that we're working with, I have conducted an in-depth research on indie and pop music video, which allows us to make decisions on whether to conform or subvert to these expectations. We conformed to the representations of social groups of teenage girls by including activities they typically engage in, such as hanging out while collecting shells at the beach (Fig 2.0) and having matching bracelets (Fig 2.1). According to Barthes' Semiotics theory, these elements act as symbolic codes, as the bracelets signify the strength of their friendship, (which is why it shows that Viola was still wearing it at the end of the music video), while the beach setting connotes freedom and nostalgia. The whole music video also shows how much time she spends with her best friend, which is a common and relatable issue in every teenage girl’s life, reflecting how teenage girls often feel safer when they have someone to rely on. It is represented positively, as the star lives a better life with the support of her best friend. This aligns with Gauntlett’s Identity Theory, as the narrative provides a mirror for the audience’s own friendships and emotions. Audiences may recognize themselves in the narrative, as they use media to explore their own sense of identity and relationships.

Synergy is when media companies collaborate for mutual benefit. Our music video follows this by featuring another star called Viola, which conforms to indie pop conventions, where artists often collaborate to gain more audience (e.g, Clairo and Beabadoobee's Glue Song remix in 2023). This will boost audience interactions. Moreover, we created a friendship-based narrative to convey the bittersweet feeling of graduating high school, since we felt that if we relate to the narrative, we could authentically convey it. We conform to indie pop's convention by using narrative about friendships. However, according to Steve Neale’s Genre theory, ‘a text must conform to the conventions enough to be recognizable, yet subvert them enough to be different and interesting.' So to subvert the typical self-introspection and peaceful friendship narratives, we incorporated a direct fight scene between Jasmine and Viola, making the emotional conflict more tangible rather than implied. While indie pop often portrays friendships through subtle distance or longing, we challenge it by adding dramatic tension, which highlights the raw emotions of growing up, misunderstandings, and the bittersweet nature of change.

Our digipak mostly conforms to the conventions of indie pop digipak design, which often features minimalistic and hand-crafted elements to create an authentic feel. To align with this aesthetic, we used a collage technique that gives the design an abstract and personal quality. Additionally, we included handwritten words to reinforcing the unpolished aesthetic that is typical of the indie pop genre. We also applied visible paper textures, which add depth and a tactile quality to the design to make it feel more handcrafted. (Fig 3.0) However, we also chose to subvert certain expectations by using a expressive handwriting style instead of the delicate cursive fonts that are commonly used in indie pop album covers. I believe this decision adds a more contemporary edge to the design while still maintaining its handmade feel.

Our music video represents teenagers and young adults that are experiencing the transition from adolescence to adulthood, which is a phase that is often filled with a sense of nostalgia, uncertainty, and emotional highs and lows. While media typically idealizes this period by presenting a singular emotional tone (such as pure happiness or sadness), we subvert this by blending both joy and conflict that comes with growing up. An example of how we convey this is through visual narrative and technical elements. Idealized memories of youth are shown through happy moments during high school, however these are contrasted with the fight scene to emphasizes the emotional contradictions of growing up. We use cooler tones in the fight scene (Fig 4.0), as it connotes sadness and emotional distance, whereas the happier scenes are presented with a warmer color tone (Fig 4.1), as it often connotes joy and comfort. This reinforces Barthes' idea that colours can function as symbolic code. Additionally, the high-angle shot of Jasmine crying (Fig 4.2) emphasizes her loss of control over the friendship breakup, making her appear vulnerable and powerless. By blending these contrasting emotions rather than depicting youth as purely carefree, our music video presents a more realistic representation of adolescence. This dominant reading challenges the overly nostalgic portrayal of youth by acknowledging both its cherished moments and inevitable change. This creates a more realistic representation, allowing our audience to connect with the music video on a personal level. The use of these techniques aligns with Stuart Hall’s Reception theory, as it encourages audiences to actively interpret the meaning based on their own experiences, rather than passively accepting an idealized version of youth.

One of the main ways we engage our audience is through the star’s social media presence. According to Blumler and Katz’s Uses and Gratifications theory, audiences actively seek media that fulfills their needs. In this case, social media provides an opportunity for fans to develop a sense of social connection. The comment section allows fans to engage not only with the artist but also with each other, which fosters a sense of community through shared interests. It also allows them to share their opinion about the contents that are posted by our star. This aligns with Clay Shirky's End of Audience theory, where he suggests that passive audience no longer exists in the digital age, because instead of simply consuming media, audiences are now active participants who create, share, and interact with content. Additionally, our star occasionally interacts with fans by liking or responding to their comments (Fig 5.0), creating a more personal and interactive experience. To further enhance audience engagement, our star’s social media page includes personal posts that showcase her REAL persona, such as OOTD (outfit of the day) photos, selfies, and product she used (Fig 5.1). This type of content allows audiences to see aspects of themselves in the star or aspire to their lifestyle. Through this, the star strengthens parasocial relationships with their audience. Due to the constantly evolving technologies, social media allows real-time interactions and story features, which have made this level of engagement possible. These tools ensure that the audience remains consistently connected with the artist.

In conclusion, our music promotion package has conveyed our dominant reading effectively. By blending nostalgia with conflict in the narrative, we've created a relatable narrative that resonates with out target audience. Our branding also reinforced Jasmine's REEL persona that we've created, which strengthened our audience engagement. One thing I would do to improve next time is following the schedule instead of spontaneously working on this project, as our lack of time management has led me to rush through our project until the very last minute, in which I feel like I could've produced a better quality of product if there were enough time. 

(Fig 1.0) - Music Video

(Fig 1.1) - Digipak

(Fig 1.3) - Instagram Highlight dedicated to Jasmine's artworks.

(Fig 1.4)

(Fig 2.0)

(Fig 2.1)

(Fig 3.0)

(Fig 4.0)

(Fig 4.1)

(Fig 4.2)

(Fig 5.0)

(Fig 5.1)

Screen Test : Audience Feedback

This blog post details how we presented a rough draft of our music video, album cover, and social media page to members of our target audience in order to receive constructive feedback. While my teacher provided the template for this blog post, the content and analysis have been written by me (Beatrice).

The purpose of this screen test is to gain audience feedback about our work and see if there are any improvements that can be made. We decided to use Google Forms to create a survey to share with our audience because we find it convenient and easy to use. We divided the Google Forms into two. The first form is for our music video, while the second form is for our social media and digipak.

Here is the link to the Google Form incase of any technical difficulties → Music Video , Social Media & Digipak

Here are our questions that we made as a team : 

Music Video 

Social Media

Digipak

For the music video, we chose these questions because we want to make sure that our music video effectively resonates with our target audience (teenagers and young adults), and accurately represents the theme of graduating from high school. We also want to assess how well the artist’s persona come across in the music video. For the social media, we want to determine the level of engagement that our target audience prefer, such as whether "fans" want direct interactions or a more curated presence of the star. As for the digipak, we want to make sure that the album cover appeals visually to our target audience and aligns with their aesthetic preferences. Hence, we included images of the digipak's sketch. Overall, we want to make sure that our social media strategy and digipak design align with our target audience’s preferences.

We included members of our target demographic in the screen test to ensure that the feedback we receive is appropriate. Finding people for the screen test was a little difficult because we were told to ask for feedbacks from people who are not taking media studies, which made it quite difficult to find some people who were willingly to respond and able to provide meaningful feedback, as we wanted to ensure that the responses were collected in an appropriate and constructive manner.

Here are the drafts that we showed audiences for the screen test:

MV Draft Link (Music Video Draft)

(Digipak Sketch)

Here are the results from the audience feedback:

Music Video

Social Media 

Digipak 

From the feedback we learned that while most aspects were well-received, there are still areas that need improvement, particularly in the music video. According to Steve Neale's Genre theory, a media text must conform to the conventions enough to be recognizable, yet subvert enough to be different and interesting. However, after reviewing the feedback, we realized that our music video largely adheres to conventions without challenging them, which made it feel monotonous or less engaging for our target audience. Despite this, the responses suggest that we were successful in representing the star’s persona, as the three words used to describe them aligned with our intended portrayal. Furthermore, we gained insights into how to refine the social media and digipak to better appeal to our target audience, and what elements we need to include in it.

While we can't really incorporate certain suggested elements from the responses (such as graduation caps, gowns, or younger actresses resembling our stars) due to accessibility constraints, the audience feedback remains invaluable in refining our music video. Specifically, we can still use the feedback to improve some areas, such as enhancing the authenticity of performance, ensuring that the lip-syncing and acting feel more natural, and adding more emotional scenes to strengthen the narrative reinforcing the idea that "the stars are graduating and truly leaving this time." This adjustment not only enhances audience relatability but also prevents the video from feeling visually repetitive and monotone, as it adds emotional depth. The screen test has been an important part of our production process, because it allows us to identify areas for improvement and gain insight into what resonates with our target demographic. By implementing these suggestions, we can create a more engaging and compelling final product. 

Reflection : This screen test has helped us a lot, as it provides us with valuable insights that we hadn’t fully considered at the start of the project. Certain elements that we initially overlooked turned out to be significant to our target audience, which shows the importance of being more critical and observant in how we construct meaning within our media product. This experience has reinforced the necessity of considering audience reception and how our work is interpreted from different perspectives. I'm really glad that we conducted this audience feedback, as it has allowed us to refine our music video and product based on real audience responses before finalizing the project, ensuring that it resonates more effectively with our target audience.

Post Production : Editing

 This blog post, written by my teammate, Jasmine, details the post production and/or editing process of our music video project.

Editing and post production:

Editing and post production:

Filming Hardware:

I decided to film the music video entirely using my Fujifilm Xt30ii camera as that would give us the best quality of video, also making it more cinematic. However, one of the biggest issues was that I had to be there all the time as the camera was mine and every time we filmed, I had to be there and bringing the equipment to school was also very heavy and was a bit hassling when some of my teammates would cancel the filming session suddenly. My battery would also run out quite quickly, which is why I initially bought a spare battery, however, I got scammed and the battery did not work when it arrived to me. It also took a long time to export the pictures and videos to my iPad at times. In hindsight, it might’ve been easier to record using our phones instead.

Editing Software:

To begin with, I decided to use DaVinci Resolve as my editing program as I had heard many good reviews about it, being new to the editing scene! I had also learned that this program had a clip-stabilizing feature which was what I really needed since at some points of the filming process, I didn’t use a tripod which meant that most of my clips were shaky to some degree, the stabilizer would help me with that issue. I had also heard that it was more user friendly compared to some of the other famous editing softwares such as Adobe. In addition, it was actually my second choice as I had initially planned to use CapCut, however, referencing my Multicam media mini-project, that software was very laggy and impacted the final product, therefore, to avoid that I decided to choose a different software. I had also researched and saw that DaVinci’s color grading feature was also top-notch and most of its tools were available for free, which is just what I needed for this project!

Editing Hardware:

I decided to use my iPad Pro (12.9-inch) (6th generation)! The reason why I decided to use this hardware instead of my laptop was dependent on some factors. The first factor was that the clips from all the filming we did were exported to my iPad via the Fujifilm app, therefore, it would be easiest to edit on my iPad since I wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of exporting the clips a second time to my laptop. Secondly, I use my iPad on a day-to-day basis and it is very easily transportable. Therefore, it would give me as much access to video editing as possible every day, and it would be quick to check on my progress on editing often for my fellow teammates. I was also able to bring my iPad to most of the filming sessions, which meant that I could work on the editing right after we finished filming, making it more efficient.

Post-production:

Here is the overall interface and timeline of our music video in DaVinci Resolve.

Initially, I did have a bunch of issues while using the software since I was a complete beginner at using it. One of the main issues was that when I was adjusting the length of the clips in the program, it kept on deleting or readjusting the duration of other clips, which confused me a lot because I didn’t understand why it was happening. At many points during editing, I had to keep readjusting the clips to the song again and again because I kept making this mistake. Eventually, I learned from my mistakes and made sure to look at the mini-timeline on top of the main timeline to make sure that I was only adjusting one clip. This is the mini-timeline I’m referring to: 

As you can see, I didn’t use anything special like markers because I didn’t know they existed until the end of the project, so it was a bit too late to implement them. I did wish I’d used them earlier because I did have a hard time matching the cuts and clips to the beat of the song. I also wasn’t able to use a clapperboard because we didn’t have one, in addition I was acting so I forgot to clap to signify the start of the lipsync since I was so focused on trying to act for the music video, so I did also make a bunch of mistakes which did make it harder for me to edit, and I think it did take longer to edit than I thought it would. 

Significant editing tools, skills and processes during post-production:

Fade-in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzvNlGXXX5c

I used this video as a tutorial on how to add a fade-in edit to the start of my music video, which my media teacher suggested as in the indie pop genre, fade-ins are very common for the start of a music video. It also eases into the video, so the audience isn’t immediately shocked by the contents of the video.

This is what the timeline looked like once I added the transition, fade-in effect to my video clip. It was very easy to do so I’m glad!

Clip Stabilizing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1WG5jc5SU0

I used the video tutorial above to learn how to stabilize a video in DaVinci Resolve. I only found out about this feature halfway through making the music video. Previously, I had always brought my super heavy tripod, making it a hassle. Using this tool removed that issue as I wouldn’t need a tripod for every scene since I could just stabilize it in post-production while recording the scenes hand-held. One issue with stabilising a clip, though, was that it would make the clips more zoomed in as the software had to compensate for stabilizing the movement by shaking the video the opposite way to reduce the movement. It is a bit complicated to explain, but you can see the effect in these two images:

The first image is before stabilizing the video, and the second is after stabilizing, in addition to the pull-out edit that I will also talk about in this post.

Pull-out:

For the pull-out, I actually learned how to do it after playing around with the software a bit. All I had to do was click this button:

Which would pull out the tools view:

Then I selected the icon highlighted above. After doing so, a smaller green box would appear on top of the video clip.

All I had to do was make the green box smaller by dragging the edges inside, which resulted in the pull-out effect shown often throughout the video.

However, there were quite a few issues I encountered while trying to use this effect. The first one being that sometimes, the pull-out would make the clip super zoomed in at the start so that sometimes, parts of the artists body were cut off, therefore I had to often adjust the intensity of the effect to avoid this issue. In addition, sometimes the pull-out effect was way too quick which made it unnatural looking so I also had to adjust that often to make sure that the music video felt “real”.

I think that utilizing the pull-out often throughout the music video helped to convey towards the audience, connoting the separation between the two friends, eventually leading to both Jasmine and Viola studying in different countries. The pull-out effect takes the audience further away from the artists in the music video, conveying the same emotions stated earlier.

Color-grading:

I had initially planned to color grade very professionally using all the tools available in DaVinci Resolve, however due to the nature of our filming being done only so close to the deadline, I was unable to do that and ended up only simply colorgrading a small part of the music video to adjust the lighting or the mood of the scene by tweaking some of the colors. 

This is an example of one of the clips I color graded, the left before the colorgrading and the right, after. Although just a slight tweak, I made the scene more cool-toned to contrast the warm tone of the previous scene, a match cut to this one to symbolize that a fight was occurring between the two characters, Jasmine and Viola. This symbolic code (Barthes) would help to give the audience context to the fight occurring as blue or cool toned scenes are often associated with sadness, or unfortunate events while warm tones in the scene earlier would symbolize happiness and love (Binary opposites by Levi Strauss, in this case being happiness vs. sadness). Here is the clip, with warm lighting before this scene to show the contrast between the coloring. 

Additionally, for some scenes, the lighting was way too dark, so the audience wouldn’t be able to see what was happening on screen. Here is an example of what I did to fix that issue:

The first image is before the edits, and the second is after the lighting edits. I increased the exposure of the dark setting, making the dark areas of the video brighter. However, in doing so, I made the grain and the bad video quality very noticeable. Even though I already used a ring light, it was still very dark so the clip came out to be very bad quality, which means we will need to record the scene again.

Reflection : Although I wasn’t heavily involved in the editing process, I contributed by consistently checking in on the progress, providing feedback, and offering ideas regarding scene coordination and the visual effects used in the music video. I believe Jasmine did an excellent job with the editing, as she successfully enhance the video’s overall impact. I’m satisfied with the final result.