CCR(creative critical reflection)

Creative Critical Reflection

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

 Before I begin for the remainder of this question I will be referring to my project as my product just to go along with the original theme of the question. OK now that we got that out of the way its time to answer the actual question. The question  basically is trying to get me to state how it follows and/or challenges conventions and how it represents social societal groups or issues. While my my product does use conventions in some way shape or form, it doesn't exactly challenges it. It more so goes along with the narrative of conventions and uses it as somewhat of a strength in the product. If I basically had to simplify what I said, its basically like going by the same rules of the same playbook. One of the big conventions of a rap music video is the artist imitating as though they are speaking to the audience. If I had to try to help you visualize what I mean is basically like them performing a live performance. In this case you are the audience and the entertainer would be watching and looking and trying to entertain you if that makes sense. Usually in this portion of the music video making process, they have the song that the made blasting over a secondary devise such as a very big speaker and then, they basically start lip syncing to the actual song in front of the camera. In essence we basically copy and pasted that convention with the tiny twist that we were not a rapper nor producer. I say we due to the fact that I wasn't working on this assignment alone I had help from my little brother. He was my camera man and he didn't do bad at his first try at being a camera man he actually did relatively well if we factor in how inexperienced he was. All and all he did a great job and did what I wanted him to do. Moving on from that little side tangent what I meant by that previous statement is we didn't have access to all the resources that rappers and producers are equipped with so we had to settle. If you need an example of what I mean then listen well. In a normal video shoot there would be many speakers blasting the artist's original song while they lip sync. I don't know about you but unless your a raper or producer you don't really have 10 speakers just lying around and ready to go. so I basically had to use the speaker of my little brothers phone. Technically you don't have to get the biggest and loudest speakers for a music video to be the best especially since the audio in the gets cut out and or muted but it definitely helps with syncing the song onto the audio file. Second convention of the rap music video play book would be too take videos from a multitude of positions angles and sceneries. I cant really explain to you why they do this, maybe it would be to add some spice or life , or maybe its because they just want to give you something visually pleasing to the eye. What ever reason that they utilize this technique they utilize it generally very frequent in rap videos if not all the time. That may just be a convention of music videos in general though. For this portion of my product if you look at my music video you can tell I used this convention to the fullest extent. I was going to different locations doing different angles and positions. For example I had one shoot where I was moving and the camera position gave a side on shot of me but I also had another shoot where I was just posted up on a tree just almost motionless just lip syncing. Another convention would be the quick and sporadic camera movements. Now I don't know whether to tell you if that's a general convention but what I can tell you is that its used by a good bit of the rap community. I say this due to the fact that if some rapper is story telling the camera movements are a lot smoother and less sporadic while if we look at mumble rap drill music and generally music that you can somewhat dance to the camera movements are a lot more jerky fast and sporadic.The song I was doing had a melody to it was basically able to do the fast paced jerky movements. If you look back at my product you can see the camera behaving in fast paced jerky mannerisms in all of the clips I took part in and that my brother shot for me. And the last convention I could think  of when pertaining to a rap music video and music videos in general would probably be very smooth transitions between clips. There should always be some type of smooth transition going from one clip to another . If you check out my product you can see the various transitions that I placed throughout my product ranging from glitches to even splashes to the next clip. To basically answer your question pertaining to social groups and issues my music video cant give an accurate representation of social groups or problems but if you here the lyrics to the song its obvious that he is giving insight to what he and others like him feel because of drug addiction so i guess you can say it gives insight about addicts and their self destructive substance abuse problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 Well to be quite frank there is only a two ways I could think of in which my product engages with the audience. To basically start off in my music video 75 to 80 percent of the time I had eye contact with the actual audience. And eye contact is generally know as a main medium in which someone or something decides to engage with another person place or thing but in our case it would be the audience. Another one that I could think of is how when I was lip syncing it seemed as tho I was performing to you. In essence all a music video is, is just a digital performance that you can access on a digital device. and performances are usually entertaining or meant to be at the very least. I don't know about you but a performance right in front of me would definitely keep my engaged.There isn't really to much to speak on this one due to the fact that music videos are so straight forward. If you have ever heard of the phrase what you see is what you get, well  music video kind of embodies that phrase. The second part of the question basically entails how my product would be distributed as a real world media text. This question is relatively simple to solve. since It is a video it can be used through the medium of the web also known as the internet. From this it can basically be distributed through online platforms such as but not limited to YouTube, Spotify , Pandora,  and Soundcloud. If you need it in a physical medium it can always be inserted onto a CD disc and marketed that way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 Well my production skill have most definitely improved a considerable margin. I can remember a period before this class where I barely knew how to operate a piece of editing software. Now I can say i'm proficient enough to do simple edits. In this project namely I did some specific things that I believe increased my Production skills.One of those such things was trying to sync the audio with the video which was no easy feat I might add. You have a lot of things to account for such as how much time would the transition put you forward or set you back . I was a lot of back and forth between  The actual clip audio and the music audio. This part really challenged your patience and basically tried to improve the accuracy of my degree of accuracy to get the clips directly inline with the audio. It was very tough but when the product was done if gave a very satisfactory rewarding feeling.when I think about it though this would fall more on the editing instead of production. I feel as tho this project also helped me improve my shooting angles. Due to all that time discovering different angles and seeing how they would work in a music video i'm pretty positive and confident that it did boost my skill in that department. I believe now that given another project that relies heavily on angles I would do well with flying colors because though this process I've sort of got acquainted with different angles. Different angles can change the feel of a video movie or any digital piece. Angles play a big part in any production of an artistic piece. While I believe I did well in camera angles I still believe I could have done a bit better in the camera movement department. To be honest with you i don't even think I really understood or know how my camera movements would effect the overall feel off the video.I just basically went about the camera movements the way that the conventions told me to. Needless to say I need a lot of work and improvement in that area so that my next piece of work is at the very least better then this one. As for my shot selection I felt that I didn't do that bad I believe that  I actually did fairly well. My shoots were by no means bad but they were not anything spectacular either. I would say that I did moderately proficient on my shot selection. My lighting selection I might add was also very good. I'm not going to act like I didn't receive any help from my phones automated intelligence system but I did chose pretty good spots when the lighting was coming in well and even in other shots with no natural lighting I still found a way for it to be somewhat nice. All and all I can definitely without a shadow of a doubt I improved. whether it was substantial or very minute ill leave your eyes to judge that one. But what I can say is that I made a great leap from the first little video project I ever did and even my most recent before this one I can say that I improved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Well in this project I used and integrated many technologies which all and all made the video result very nice. Fist off all I decided to change my editing software and use a better software. I use to moderately like this editing software by the name of Openshot due to the fact that it was not incredibly hard to use and if performed the basic functions I needed in a software no more and no extra. Now though I have decided to make a switch to a software application called Videoleap and might i say in terms of editing this is the best choice I ever made. Fist of all the versatility of this application totally blows Openshot out of the water. You could do so much more with this application. My favorite part of this application is the placing key frames. if you need a reference to what that looks like I implemented it in the portion where I show the title of the video. Its a very useful feature due to the effect that it can do if you want it to track a particular object such as a hand and using key frames you can even make this digital zoom effect which is nice. Another effect was heavily implemented in my project was the cut/slice feature that I used to cut clips and rearrange the clips. Now there is the same thing in every other editing software but I found this one the cleanest and easiest to use maybe it might just be me being bias though. I used the cut feature to basically put parts of different video shoots in different and random parts of the video. If i'm being honest tho this feature is the one that really helped me tho most in this project. Another part of the software that played a big roll was the transitioning features. Now i'm not gonna lie it took me a little bit to get use to this part of the software and if were being frank I like Openshots implementation of the cut/slice mechanic but the creativeness of the transitions actually made up for that. There so cool and creative and there is a multitude of special transitions to choose from. In my project you can see the different transitions pretty clearly and it sort of gave it a more polished finished professional look. I was also able through this app to export this file in 4k 60 frames per second which is a big plus. The software implementation was good but it was not the only thing that made my project satisfactory. The hardware on my phone with its 12 megapixel camera did a lot of the work of making it look nice and smooth especially since I put the camera on 4k 60 frames per second aka super smooth and very detailed. if were talking about how I had to integrate online technologies would be a perfect point would be the audio. basically I had to take you tube link and put it into a YouTube to mp3 converter. It was pretty simple and it made sure I didn't have to use the poor audio of the clips which is nice in its own right.

2. How does your product engage

with audiences AND how would it be distributed as a real media text? 3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project? 4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?