My Creative Critical Reflection is presented in the form of an essay, guided by these four questions :
- How do your products represent social groups or issues?
- How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
- How do your products engage with the audience?
- How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
Throughout the course of this school year, I worked in a group with Vanessa and Antonia with the end in mind of creating 3 media products - A Music Video, Digipak and Social Media Page, more specifically an Instagram page. From the very beginning we knew we wanted to create media products that have an impact on the audience/viewer, no matter how small.
Firstly, we all agreed that we want to create a sense of identity with our work, we didn't want to just create 3 media products that have no sense or continuity with each other and no clear purpose or reason. Because of this it was very important for us to have a very clear understanding of what our target audience is, in order to accurately cater towards it. When creating any sort of product we consider it is very important to analyse firstly the market, the demand and the audience/niche you are catering towards, in such a way that you are then able to confidently place your business or product in a position where it can grow.
After conducting our target audience research we found that the majority of the sample was between the ages of 15-18 and generally female. This data predominantly influenced our choice of artist and music. Because of this data, we knew we needed to choose a song that would attract and entice this target audience. For this reason, I believe our products represent social groups and issues - because of the attention to detail and research put behind our products, we make sure that our product (music video, digipak, social media page) is almost customised to our audience.
We decided to choose Melanie Martinez as an artist and the song carousel because her music and more specifically this song has had a dramatic and drastic impact and popularity among our generation (15-18 - our target audience). Taking from our own experiences and social circles, we asked around about music had an impact on us, and we noticed a pattern -Melanie Martinez was predominantly and continually brought up.
From our research and also conversations between friends, we found that Melanie was so loved and popular at a particular time because of the topics and issues she writes and sings about in her music. Topics that are otherwise taboo or brushed under the rug, young girls felt a sense of acceptance and support in regards to these various personal issues that left their fingerprint in her music. This is again another reason why I believe our product represents social issues and social groups - as specified target audience all have this distant memory of listening to Melanie's music and feeling heard.
Like mentioned before, we wanted a sense of continuity and identity with our media products. Because of this you can see many recurring colour schemes, graphic elements or texts that work together to create and strengthen a brand identity. For example: illustration of carousel found on the insta page and digipak, purple and green colour schemes, use of clouds for visual identity and even movement etc.). During our reflection, we were actually talking about how happy we are with the visual part of our products and how we feel that we created a strong visual identity and sense of branding, uniting in a sense all 3 products.
Our products engage with the audience in various ways, specifically in the context of the music video, we wanted the viewer to feel like they are part of the music video. For this reason the clips are filmed from a POV camera angle and the protagonist of the music video is maintaining constant and intense eye contact. This also plays along with the meaning behind the song and video. The song mainly refers to a one-sided love affair, where one person feels like they can never truly reach the other. Melanie seems to be frustrated as she realises she is unable to move forward in the relationship. It resembles two points on opposing sides of a rotating circle. The song portrays the pain of loving someone so deeply to the point that one feels trapped, yet it is impossible to get their attention no matter how hard you try. Because of this the protagonist is constantly walking away and luring the viewer into their mysterious spells into their "unreprociprocated love" making you crave for their attention and love, so you follow them, and are under their spell.
Our research, like mentioned above was a very significant part of our creative process. We researched and analysed a lot of music videos and digipaks in order to understand the conventions of these. We feel like we managed to create the perfect balance of use of conventions while also being unconventional with our products. I feel that without that research we wouldn't have been able to create such thorough products full of dimension.
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