Music Video Midterm!

HELLO! This month my group and I have been working on a music video for our midterm project in class. I have to say it was a blast. Here's a quick vlog of the music video as well as a link to watch the actual video in its entirety!

 MUSIC VIDEO

Music Marketing Project Post 1

     Hey blog! We had a cute little research project for music marketing last week, it was such a good opportunity for me to research something I'm so incredibly interested in and I got a good category to choose from. The assignment wanted us to choose artists/bands under the same label from a single genre who had released an album in the last 5 years.

    I chose Ariana Grande and The Jonas Brothers under Republic Records (part of the UMG group) as my artists in the Pop genre and I had to a load of research to fill out a case study chart my teacher provided. I simply searched up the different categories on Google and saw what kind of websites popped up, I chose the most reliable one with the most information that was accurate and used the information I saw. I also made a couple of inferences here and there as I didn't see everything through the websites and being a teenager in the 21st century it's pretty easy to know things about artists I listen to.

    Now we have a project coming up where we have to create an entire brand identity for an artist we create with our groups. As my group and I got Pop before hand we have to create a pop group for our new band and form a brand identity for them. We also have to film an entire music video based on an already existing pop song, we chose "We Are Young" by fun. because, as my group member Alana said, it gave the most nostalgic vibes which my case study on The Jonas brothers was very much centered around. We created our band name "Eventide" and based their brand around fireflies as we felt that was the most nostalgic, 2012 vibes. We named the fanbase fireflies as well because having a fanbase name is so important when it comes to marketing a certain artist to someone.

    On the first day of work, we created our filming schedule and decided we'd film on the weekends mostly and work on the marketing during the class days we had. We split up our jobs, I took on creating the merchandising as well as helping editing and present our final presentation of our band. For filming purposes, I'll be working the most with the lighting (as it is my specialty) and acting in the actual music video. We created the storyline we wanted to follow before the first day of working on the project and we decided to create a music video with a storyline that also truly showcases the band. I'm expecting a fun time with this project and I'll keep updating soon!

Mise-en-scene project

 Hellooo blog!

So, last week our teacher had us do a mise-en-scene project. A quick recap on what mise-en-scene means, it's the lights, set, costumes, props, etc. of a film or any sort of media creation. For example, in a musical like Mamma Mia you'd see Greek buildings, a beach, or the island as well as lighter colors, high-key lighting, the diary, Donna's overalls. You get it. 

Now the goal of the activity was to see if we truly understood mise-en-scene in the context of a specific character. Our teacher gave us a short character description and we had to create their entire life through a soundscape, mood board, presentation, tactile board, and set model. My character was a movie lover who enjoys social get togethers with friends, they write a movie blog on which they post critiques of popular movies. We chose her name as Cameron Lee and made her a USC student majoring in Film who posts on Letterboxd. My group created a model of her apartment, a model doll of her, a tactile board of things associated with her, a notebook she would use to write her reviews down before posting them, a mood board for her character, a soundscape of her daily life, and a presentation to tie it all together. 

We had to create stations after all was done to allow our fellow classmates to view our creation, each group had their own little area to setup. We used 4 laptops to allow for each seat at the station to be able to click through our Google Slides presentation found here: Mise-en-Scene slides. We set up the tactile board in the middle so every student at the station could feel it while watching our soundscape as they were directly tied together, students would watch the soundscape video which had words presented, such as "Touch the popcorn.", and the students would touch that certain item for the part they were on. We left the model of the doll standing next to some of the computers as to present her and we left the set model on the desks that the doll wasn't on as to create a better space. The notebook was left near the center of others two desks, the formation was sort of like every 2 desks had something out of the 4. The bottom left and right shared the notebook, the top right and bottom right shared the doll, the top left and bottom left shared the set model, and the two top ones didn't have anything but we left space for them to view the notebook as well. 

We used the classic film major stereotype seen both in movies and real life, they love movies and become very critical of every film they watch as they know more about the working of the films than others do. We also used the stereotype of a college student as her outfits consisted mostly of sweatpants and her life consisted of school and friends. I have to say my group and I worked very well together and we were on the same page about everything when it came to creating our character. We all did our own parts as well without any arguments about who was or wasn't doing something, I took the mood board and creating the slides presentation, Marissa took the soundscape, Christina took the model doll, and Alana took the set model and the notebook creation. We were told by our peers that ours was very well done, which was nice to hear as we had put so much work into it.

To see all the media from this project click here → Mise-en-Scene media

What's so intriguing about Crime?

        Over the years many viewers have found themselves entranced by crime and gangster films. It mixes so many different genres all into one allowing for drama, romance, comedy, and action to meld into one story where viewers never know how to feel about their characters. Crime can either be gangster crime such as the infamous The Godfather or it could be a show of investigation such as the TV show Hannibal or the show Pretty Little Liars. While all of these examples could be put under different genres, they're overall based on crime and investigation.

    The genre has become so infamous for the way it builds suspense within the viewers, wanting viewers to beg for more, just so they can find out inevitably who did it? Director Martin Scorsese is probably the best known for these kinds of films such as The Departed and Goodfellas. These kinds of films have grossed billions of dollars for the film industry as they entrance you.

    These films focus on acts of breaking the law and tend to be psychological thrillers as you never know who's guilty. Most of the time it revolves around the criminals but can also revolve around victims or the actual investigators. The most common plotlines could be murder, theft, or kidnapping investigations as well as betrayal and the lives of criminals. The genre especially explores guilt or pride in crime as well as the dilemma of what is good and what is bad. The movie Ocean's Eight shows the pride criminals can have in their crimes but musicals such as Les Misérables can leave you questioning whether they were bad people or just people in need. 

    Crime films in a broader subject use realistic lighting and muted tones as they want to create neutrality and suspense. On the other hand, films such as gangster films darker lighting to up the suspense even more and create a certain aura around the characters. The sound design consists of echoing and suspenseful sounds and music, building and building on the suspense needed for these films. They're based in urban settings as you wouldn't usually see big crimes done on the Moon, fictional situations aren't exactly used in crime films often but their storylines may be entirely fictional. There's a lot of different perspectives in editing as crime films tend to want to show the suspense of the runner and the chaser.

    Crime films tend to marketed with the slight reveal of a betrayal or plot twist, building suspense for the viewers before they ever go to watch the film. They use voiceovers over scenes of scrambling and action as well as using suspenseful music to entrance viewers by allowing them to think that they may figure out the mystery on their own. 

    An incredible example of this is Zodiac with Jake Gyllenhaal as it follows detectives and journalists as the follow the crimes of the non-fictional serial killer, The Zodiac Killer, it's a widely muted film in terms of colors using a lot of blues to show the depressing tone throughout as Gyllenhaal's character begins to spiral. It's also incredibly realistic as it has the urban setting of San Francisco and uses a real killer as their protagonist. The film focuses on building frustration and tension in the characters as they fail over and over again to find their killer. 

    Another amazing example would be The Silence of the Lambs which similar to Hannibal focuses on the character Hannibal Lecter, while the film is largely known for its' horror aspects, the way it plays with the investigations of Clarice Starling and the help of Lecter makes it fall under the crime genre umbrella. The movie surrounds itself in a complex investigation that builds suspense and makes you think that if Hannibal is helping, is he so awful? The use of dark tones and close-ups build incredible tension between the characters and builds suspense the entire film.

    

Sound projects

     Hey people! In the last 2 weeks we've been working on sound techniques in AICE Media Studies. Through the sound lessons I learned how certain smaller sounds make a huge difference and we learned about the concept of foley sounds (the sounds made by something that isn't the reality of what it is.)

    For our first sound project we were directed to create a video less sound project, we had to convey a full story in 1-2 minutes without any video only using sound. We were directed to use either Microsoft's Clipchamp or Adobe's Premiere Pro, I decided to use Clipchamp (editing software) for my project as it was simplistic and easy to learn with. Me and my partner, Leo, decided to create our story about a student getting to school late and running into (literally) multiple obstacles on the way. We knew our project had to surround itself around running and the sound of footsteps but our teacher advised us that it may get repetitive so we decided we needed to add different sounds to overlay some of the footsteps in order to make it sound better overall. During brainstorming we just wanted to figure out what kind of smaller sounds and the kinds of obstacles we should set out for the subject in order to create a developed storyline. Our outline helped us organize our sounds into different scenes allowing us to identify which sounds would be needed and when we would need them. I feel that we made good choices in how we were going to avoid making repetitive noises and creating a true storyline but I would've wanted to improve how realistic we could've made our foley sounds as I felt they didn't sound entirely real to me.

    To view this specific sound project click here → Sound project #1

    Now for our second sound project we were told to go back to our previous silent One-Word Film projects and add the sounds to the project. I, once again, used Clipchamp as my editing software because it was very easy to understand for the last project. During brainstorming my partner, Alana, and I wanted to make sure we were able to catch all the smaller sounds and still emphasize the very loud fidgeting being done as our initial project was dependent on big actions so we needed big sounds. The outline allowed us to pinpoint the kind of sounds we needed in certain places, especially the amounts of the smaller sounds to know how many rows we would need. I think the project was very well done overall but I would've liked to identify more of the smaller sounds as the project felt empty at times and I didn't know what sounds to put in the background so I used a general AC noise just to fill the emptiness. 

    To view this specific sound project click here → Sound project #2

One Word Film project

    In class last week we worked on our One Word Film projects. We were instructed to create a silent short film that represents a word chosen by our instructor. My chosen word was: Tolerant. 

    

    We worked with partners for this assignment and began by creating a brainstorming sheet and a storyboard which you can find here - Storyboard. When doing the storyboarding for this assignment with my partner, who I will refer to as AR, we thought to create a story of a peaceful sort of tolerance and focus on annoying habits people may have in a classroom as our setting had to take place in a school. The storyboard allowed us to visualize the specific kinds of shots and the cuts that would allow AR and I to convey the word as well as possible. Using the app Adobe Express allowed us to use the editing skills we chose to the fullest extent in order to convey the word chosen for us by our instructor.

   

     I believe we did well in conveying our interpretation of the word, shown in when we asked a peers what they thought the word was they got something directly relating to it. I also believe we did well in utilizing the editing techniques we were taught in class to make a pleasing video. I think the one thing we could've done better for a silent short film is to not rely our plot on the sounds, we tried using incredibly expressive actresses in order to be able to use movement to replace sound but that didn't always work throughout. I think I could also improve on the use of time management when there's a time limit as that is something I struggled with when completing the project.

    To view my One Word Film for Tolerance it is found here - OWF Project

Camera Shots quiz

     In AICE Media on August 25, 2025 we began our first project entitled the Camera Shots quiz in which we were tasked as a class to create a Slides or PowerPoint presentation using still shots, utilizing the shot techniques we had learned in the previous class, to create a story using two objects.

    Me and my partner, who I'll refer to as AR, began by making a chart of the shots we planned to make and their descriptions of the importance to the story. We found our two objects (a water bottle and a pencil pouch) and began our story. We wanted to create a story that would turn our inanimate objects into something emotional and heartfelt as we felt that the project itself should convey something more than just the photos of the objects. We began by giving the water bottle a heartfelt story in which we determined that the water bottle was abandoned in the class unlike the pencil pouch that was grabbed immediately in the first couple of shots. We gave the water bottle emotion through fake tears (yes, water dripping down the bottle) and using over-the-should and point-of-view shots showing the water bottle peeking at the human who is forgetting them. The point-of-view shot shows a disorienting ceiling as the water bottle was dropped and left alone, showing the true emotion of the water bottle, thought it is an inanimate object.

    We did as much as we could with our knowledge and with our iPhones, but I would've liked to improve on our time management as we spent a lot of the time on planning and we barely had time for our actual shots, shown in the project, certain shots seem rushed over others where we thought we had more time for. I would also like to improve in the creating of the title card and the establishing shot as I feel our establishing shot was mediocre at best for the story we were attempting to convey.

    If you'd like to view this project you can access it at AICE Media Camera Shots quiz