Creative Critical Reflective
1) How do your products represent social groups or issues ?
Nowadays, many young people are facing mental health problems, and they look to social networks to heal their minds and release them from the pressure. Social media often makes people become more lonely ,because it only gives them illusions and makes them more detached from real lives.
Research carried out showed that up to 22.8% of children responded with symptoms of depression. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Vietnam has also announced that the current rate of children and adolescents with mental health problems is up from 8% to 29%. One of the factors attributed to this increase is the availability of social media apps, which they can access very easily through their mobile phones. Therefore, our MV wants to reflect a real problem that many teenagers aged 16 to 25 are facing: depression, loneliness in life.
In my MV, I have shown the bored face to represent the negative emotions of people suffering from symptoms of depression. I also used the default blur effect when the protagonist is studying at the table with different acts, to make it look even more stagnant, and enhance the feeling of fatigue. I divided the frame in half to juxtapose with the girl spreading positive energy to the the boy who then transforms from a depressed person to a cheerful person. My intention is to capture the protagonist's perception of an 'ideal' life, which he has seen again and again on his social media. Nowadays, teenagers are exposed to so many 'influencers' that they often feel their lives are inadequate, this can lead to depression and other mental health issues.
At the end of the MV, everything has returned to reality, the alarm rings to wake up the protagonist. In this scene, I wanted to convey the message that when you go on social media to lighten your mood, you might only be temporarily escaping from your current stress situation; nothing would have changed in real life. So our product wants to motivate people to live more positively, try to be more open to others. I hope that it will encourage the audience to be proactive and live their lives on their own terms, not be guided by perfect lives on social media
2) How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of branding ?
When aiming to promote an artist and their products, it is very important that a unified sense of branding be created that an audience can immediately recognize and relate to the artist and the brand. For our production logo, we chose a dreamy blue mix with a pink background and the text Tgn_studio; we use the font "Gistesy", which is readable, memorable, so that can improve our brand recognition. I also added the logo at the beginning of the music video,social media page, and the digipak which can build a sense of branding.
I want my digipak to maintain a sense of consistent branding, so I chose a color scheme with the same background as the production logo. In addition, I added some watercolor paint stains, which look like fluffy clouds floating in the background, hidden behind the main graphic. Because most of the scene in the MV happened in the dream of the male protagonist, these elements can help to create a sense of dreaminess connected directly to the theme of the MV.
Regarding the promotion of the artist and creation of star image, I used some of the footage of the two main characters on the cover of the digipak, I have presented the characters in their perfect lives as they are happy dancing together. I also added the tiktok dance clip to my social media pages to further engage with my target audience. Viral Tiktok videos are incredibly popular right now, and my audience might recreate the dance from my music video and share it; this will help further cement a clear sense of branding through multi-platform engagement.
Inside cover of the digipak, included the 3 polaroid photo border, which shows the character at their happiest, and I posted it on social media again to enhance the uniformity in my products. It also represents something more timeless and permanent, which links to my message about living in the moment.
The paper airplane plays a key role in my MV, because it represent the tool to connect with the female character .Therefore, I wanted it to appear in all my products. In my digipak, I have included instructions to help people make a paper plane. Also included this instructions and further details on my Instagram pages, hope that it would encourage people to create a trend that would further help audiences connect with my product. I feel that I have created a strong sense of branding across 3 of my products and also incorporated to encourage viral reproduction in both the dance footage and the paper plane
3) How do your products engage with the audience ?
The theme of teenage relationships and first love following research for my project, I identified that people would prefer to see young and realistic vs matures with heavily applied make-up. Therefore, I chose two teenagers as protagonists in my MV, I hope that my target audience will be the teenagers. The music video starts with the male protagonist tiredly returning to his house, immediately sitting at his desk for studying. This is something teenagers could relate to because there is huge pressure from parents to study all the time. The pressure could be blamed for the loneliness and depression. I try to put my character in the real situation, showing how a depressed teenager gets on social media only to show that they're in a cute love relationship, pretending like they're fine but actually they're not. I believe that quite many teenagers may already experienced something like this before
According to "Uses of Gratification" theory, there are 5 needs that help audiences engage with media products. I have focused on two of these: entertainment and social interaction. My video base is about the relationship, which is make believe and only happens in the protagonist's dream. The audience will be drawn to the escapist nature of the dream, and their needs for entertainment will be fed. To increase this engagement, I have made a Tiktok video. In recent years, Tiktok has exploded in popularity, with 32.25% of the population using it for entertainment. So I chose the "amazing trend" on Tiktok for my dancing scene. I also added the camera screen filter on it so it created a sense like we were filming the video on TikTok. Moreover, after that scene, the phone is stuck on the tripod, and two characters are dancing in-front of it so when our audience looks at it, they will feel a sense of familiarity because most of the teenagers usually use the tripod to film for the Tiktok video. I have brought the hobbies of teenagers to my music video, which can engage the audience
By including a focus on Tiktok dance craze, I hope that the audience create their own recreations of the dance, this could further enhance the connection with the audience,the star and develop social interactions. Finally, craft is now very popular, it also relates to the paper plane in my video. By including instructions on how to make paper plane on both my social media page and digipak, I would hope that the audiences might be drawn on to experiment to paper plane creation, which again could be shared on social media platform
4) How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge convention?
Based on the music video theory of "Andrew Goodwin" , he believed that the visuals and illustration of a music video would link with the music and the beat,follow the genre characteristics such as lighting,props, etc., and need to have a performance, narrative based. My MV also has these elements. There are some scenes that match with the music, such as the scene where the male character first looks at the girl when she runs past his house, matched with the lyric "Do you see her". In addition, my MV also included the scene where the male character lip-syncs to the lyric and dances, and the content of the MV is based on the storyline. Our music video genre is indie pop, so I used high-key lighting, natural light to create a sense of energetic atmosphere, comfortable outfits that built up the indie pop music video.
For the digipak, I did research and analyze some of the digipaks of celebrities such as Rex Orange County's "Who Cares?", Ariana Grande's "My Everything"; …I adhered to these core elements with 4 panel, the front cover of which is footage of the 2 protagonist with a lighter background color and simple font text to make him stand out. According to the research, at least 1.318 billion users around the world, lots of celebrities use Instagram to promote their music videos. So I chose Instagram for my social media pages because this platform allows me to upload unlimited footage, videos, and stories and can reach a range of audiences around the world that help me promote our music video more easily and build our brand recognition.