Music Video Creative Critical Reflection

 1. My project uses conventions of the humor genre to entertain and indulge the audience. By wrapping presents incorrectly and getting overly excited, the audience is sucked into what is about to occur. The costumes that are worn make the video stand out under the Christmas theme, especially when we are doing things like wrapping presents and standing under a Christmas tree. At first, the video doesn't start out as humorous, but as the story unfolds, it becomes more and more demented and comedic. The happy Christmas music in the background contrasts what actually happening in our depiction of Christmas day. I used filters and camera movements to better introduce scenes, creating a more humorous element. The finished product. By introducing Santa as a homeless guy and making him do Christmas with us, it makes our video a lot more twisted from a typical Christmas music video. The issue that is represented by our product is social anxiety which many people face. Going out in public wearing Christmas outfits, there was a lot of people looking at us and laughing. It was difficult to get out there and do it, but having the finished product, I am happy with how everything turned out.

2. My product engages with audiences by humoring them and bringing happy spirits in these troubled times. Because there is so much action going on in the video, the viewer is shown a completely different side of Christmas. They are engaged in the beginning by the vibrant outfits and happy joyous music. Very quickly, it transforms into something much less expected. The audience is thrown off because they think that they are about to see all of these wholesome Christmas scenes. It is quite the opposite and as we pull Santa out from under the pier, it goes in a different direction. As a real media text, this would be represented as a music video, to go along with the song Last Christmas. Because it does not cover the entire four-minute-long length of the song, it would better be a comedy skit of the song, or a part of a funny Christmas movie.

3. Through this project, I experimented much more with iMovie and different types of camera angles and movements. I had a lot of fun implementing new ideas, and even though I went into the project with a lot of ideas, my friends helped me to make what was originally a rough plan into a full story. We ended up getting a lot of footage and it ultimately made the editing process more difficult because I was so unsure of what I wanted to use. My overall production for this project, although was much more advanced from a cinematic perspective, was much more inclined on the story. Despite this, I used lots of transitions between the scenes to establish a change in time or scenery, used filters to derive a mood or show a different perspective. Putting in music and mixing the sounds became a much more seamless process, and I learned a lot about the vast functions of iMovie, which can be applied to all of the scenes individually.

4. For this project, all of the filming was done on my iPhone 8. Because the camera on the phone has a pretty high-quality resolution, the clips all came out pretty good. The only part of it all that was not originated from my phone was the music, which I uploaded from my computer. I used the song Last Christmas by Wham, downloaded it as an mp3 file, and sent it to my phone. Using iMovie on my phone to edit it all made the process much easier and kept the footage quality high. As opposed to my previous projects, I had my friends with me to help me film the video. This allowed me to implement camera movement, such as the following shot, rather than remaining stagnant throughout the video. The only real challenge that I faced was finding time to film because I did it with friends who are busy often, and also trying to keep the story on track and choosing what scenes I wanted.