Looking Back on the Production Process

 After the trials and tribulations that were encountered during the production period of the music video, it's time to reflect on the work that was done. The video is far from perfect, but the experience was informative and important to note.

 

The video has many aspects that both coincide with and challenge the conventions of Christmas music videos. A major difference between the product and productions in popular culture is that the product does not feature scenes of a musical artist or band performing the song. Most music videos feature this, but the production did not follow this standard in order to tell a story with the video. The video does, however, have many of the shots seen in major productions, such as three shots and pans. One shot that was included in the video that was uncommon among the videos was a POV shot. This shot was used to add diversity to the shots present in the project and add to the storytelling aspect. The props, costuming and sets present in the video all follow the guidelines of music videos in their genre. Cheerful lights, fun hats, and decorated trees are all shown in videos that display holiday music. The cheerful mood in the project is almost a requirement for music videos with holiday music videos and it is seen extensively in the video.

 

 In this project, teenagers are represented to bridge the gap between classic and modern. The song we chose is from 1963, so each character almost stereotypically represents teenagers today. All of the characters wear current trends – hoodies, necklaces, piercings, etc. This is an attempt to appeal to the age group of around 13 to 19.  The project does this to try and modernize the song without sacrificing the classic sound and feel. The characters are seen hanging out, like most teenagers do, and participating in activities that follow the festive theme of the video. If the project was an official video, it would most likely be distributed on sites where teenagers and music videos generally converge. This means the video would be on sites like Youtube, TikTok, and Twitter. The video would also be distributed on things like MTV Classic, a channel made strictly for viewing music videos. This would be where the video would reach a broader audience, as more generations converge on cable channels.

 

Throughout the production process, I learned extensively about both filming and editing. This was the first project where my team added transitions. It made the video much less choppy, which is a major critique we got from the first video. During the editing phase, the team had a surplus of footage to sift through. This was both a blessing and a curse. Multiple takes that were shot were unsatisfactory and that lead to a lot of problems when trying to recreate the original idea we had. My team struggled with cutting down the amount of footage we had. As a result, a lot of interesting and fun shots were taken out of the video. A POV shot of the group in bumper cars was filmed, but it was eventually scrapped because of time. The filming process in itself provided knowledge as well. Filming this project was much harder than the last. Filming more than one character proved to be difficult when all three members had to be in the video at the same time. I learned a lot about three shots in terms of what did and did not work. 

 

The same tactics used for the previous project were used in the music video. However, some things did change about the production process. Instead of having only one person film all the scenes, we shifted the responsibility between the three of us. This meant different phones and grades of quality. Each phone was capable of different things, so we experimented with that as we filmed. When the editing process began, we split that up as well. We used two different software, CapCut, and Videoleap, to finish our video. Simpler processes like cutting down clips and moving around scenes were mainly done in CapCut. Videoleap was used more for the technical parts, like adding transitions and music. We found a much simpler way of getting music for this project. Instead of screen recording a video, we simply downloaded the song as an mp3 file using a website. This made it much easier to add the song to the video, cutting out the annoying extraction process. 

 

Looking back on the production process, I have learned information that will greatly improve my next project. I think a major part lesson that came from this video was how to plan out filming days and the filming process in general. For the next project, I plan on keeping some things from this one, like the editing improvements and the amount of footage. I will not, however, be continuing to make simple mistakes with planning and execution. I have major ideas for what’s to come, and I’m excited for what’s next