Final Promotional Package

Here are my group's final media products, consisting of our final music video, digipak, and social media. 

Music Video

Here is the Google Drive link in case there are errors to the embedded link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/195IIXR1PP8jrsNZa7ECYpM8bKu0nF7Ew/view?usp=sharing

Digipak

Front cover

Inside

Back cover

Social Media

Here is a link to our social media account: https://www.instagram.com/nadavanyaa/

Critical Self-Reflection

This is my critical self-reflection for component 3. 

We chose Catch Me In the Air by Rina Sawayama, an Indie Pop song, as our song choice for this project. Our star actor starring in the music video goes by the name Vanya Viani. Her persona is similar to her real personality, we want to portray her as someone sweet, passionate, and wise given her journey that will be displayed in the music video. The dominant reading that we want for the audiences is that through watching the journey of our star actor, the audience should interpret the music video to be an inspiring and motivational message as the values that are resonated revolve around self-growth and maturity. 

In order to create a distinguishable branding within our star actor and thus convey our intended dominant reading, we had to consistently align and create similarities within the star persona’s visuals and themes. One example would be how we implemented warm and natural color tones across the star actor’s media products such as pictures, album covers, as well as music videos. 

The continuous application of this through the different media products may make the star actor’s branding distinguishable for the audience across different platforms. In addition to that, her star persona may be affected by this as well since the way she designs and structures her products can reflect how she is as a person. The warm tone may create a sense of comfort within the audiences, making the star actor seem more vulnerable and approachable. In addition to that, the natural tone is used to give the audiences the impression of realisticness within the star actor’s personality. Altogether, this is used to support the building of her persona as someone authentic and down-to-earth. Therefore, this shows how branding ties all the star actor’s features together and allows the audience to recognize the right image and type of person directed to them.

Before creating the music video, I had done research on Indie Pop genre conventions since that was the genre of the song we were using for the music video. I found several common elements across the different Indie Pop songs I went through such as how most of the songs had included storytelling elements, a play of costume and props for their mise-en-scene, and a low-budget quality product that resulted in a more dreamy or retro style themed look. My team and I chose to conform to conventions that would in the end work well together with the star actor’s brand identity as well as what could be doable with the resources we have as high school students with limited budget. My team and I chose to conform to the conventions of including a narrative in the music video as the lyrics had a deep meaning behind it and we would like to take the opportunity to build it based on our interpretation. Another feature we conformed to is the low budget quality where this can be seen through how we had the star actor used simple clothes and used props. On the other hand, the music video had subverted several other conventions such as how firstly, we did not use romantic connotations in our narrative and instead focused on family connotations between a mother and a daughter. This was shown through POV camera shots of the star actor through her mother’s camera, close up shots of photographs of only the star actor with her mother, as well as mise-en-scene where we used props such as the mother’s handwritten notes and dress, showing explicitly the mother’s role in the star actor’s journey. We subverted this convention as we wanted to appeal differently to the target audience in a way where not only can we reach a more niche psychographic audience, there can be an increase in the exposure of other types of relationships possible in a narrative amongst the many common Indie Pop narratives that revolve around romantic relationships. 

Through this narrative that revolves around a mother and daughter relationship, we represented a social group and a social issue through it. Social groups we have represented are young women in which their traditional representation would be career oriented. However we chose to subvert to those stereotypes by showcasing the star actor to be more family oriented throughout her career journey. We did this by adding mise-en-scenes of prominent props especially in important stages of her career such as her first ever stage performance where we slipped in the star actor’s moms belongings for the star actor to use throughout that scene. Deciding to subvert this social group’s traditional representation was done to widen the audience’s exposure to the changes in the symbolic codes by Barthes revolving around gender stereotypes, where now traditional beliefs have come to evolve and take place in society. 

A social issue we chose to represent as well is low-income class people that most of the time are stereotypically represented in a way where they are always leading a struggling and difficult life to evoke a sense of pity and sympathy towards the audience. We chose to subvert these traditional representations, emphasizing that people who are in the low-income class don't always stay that way as it doesn’t take away their ability to work hard, grow as a person, and reach success. We displayed this with the changes in the setting when comparing the present timeline to the past timeline where it can be seen that the star actor in the current timeline looks more well taken care of and is surrounded with higher quality products whereas during the past timeline, her childhood self did not have all that. This conforms to Stuart Hall’s representation theory that there is no real meaning in the media, the media companies create the meaning. The media portrays certain issues differently to how they actually are in reality in order to reinforce their own beliefs towards the audiences which in turn will lead to certain people being misrepresented and misunderstood. 

After filming the music video, we moved on to creating our star actor’s social media page where through the posting of both personal and promotional content, we were able to invite audience engagement. Modern technology has made it possible for audiences to immediately connect towards artists through the usage of comment sections or direct messages where here, we took advantage of being able to use the comment section. In the star actor’s personal posts, I have included simple questions about the audience’s preferences in certain things so that because it is simple, the audiences can easily respond to it. This was the main boost in our audience engagement as since both the audience and the star actor had access to the comment section, both can communicate with each other continuously, and therefore boosting the audience engagement. We taught that adding questions asking about their daily life or their preferences would make them more willing to answer taking into account Blumler and Katz’s Uses and Gratification theory where people consume media for diversification. 

A Digipak was also created after the creation of the music video as well where genre conventions played an important role in the creation. During the research, conventions that were most commonly used by Indie Pop artists in their Digipak would be their low-budget quality. This was easily conformed by us taking into account that we have been creating the entire music video with a low-budget as well, therefore the quality matches perfectly together. We showcased this by instead of purchasing high-quality props, we had used worn down props such as crayons and old music sheets. In addition to that, we chose to craft the image by drawing as well where this worked well for us in the end as it adds to the artistic, down-to-earth, persona we have created for the star actor. 

In conclusion, all of our products, music video, social media, and digipak, came together well. Because of the continuous follow of theme and aesthetic, they successfully display the branding we want the star actor to revolve around.

This is the link to the Google Docs where I worked on my critical self-reflection: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fv4A9z4EdXRBmxnYTBtMD7WgRGQEW4OgWx8mdaMworI/edit?usp=sharing

Screen Test: Audience Feedback

This post explains how we showed a rough draft of our music video, album cover, and social media page to some members of our target audience in order to receive helpful feedback.

The purpose of a screen test is to gain audience feedback about our work and see if there are any improvements that can be made. We decided to use Google Forms to create a survey to share with our audience because it is an online platform that can be accessible anywhere at any time. It also allows participants to save their answers automatically, thus being more convenient for them. Additionally, our team members can collaborate easily as it allows us to edit the form together. 

Here are our questions in the Google Form:  

https://forms.gle/vvfDcQXEVH3kFaPt5

We chose these questions because we were interested in understanding if our target audience could decode and interpret our music video with our intended message. Asking them additional questions on the digipak/album covers lets us know which images appealed the most to our audience. Moreover, considering their suggestions for social media posts would likely increase our chances at engaging our audience. We included members of our target demographic (young Indonesian women and teenagers) in the screen test to ensure that the feedback we receive is appropriate.

Finding people for the screen test was easy because we were already familiar with a lot of people who are part of our target audience. We also initially only needed 4 people from our school to help us with our feedback but we decided to ask 2 more Indonesian people from outside our school and outside Bali as we intend our target audience to include young women from all over Indonesia.

Here are the drafts that we showed audiences for the screen test: 

Music video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13zxYsOspH_jBtg38i4zicwVlhZIFl3-V/view?usp=sharing 

Digipak (Album Cover):

Here are the results from the audience feedback:

We collected a total of 6 responses (5 females, 1 male with an age range of 17-18)

Respondent 1

Respondent 2

Respondent 3

Respondent 4

Respondent 5

Respondent 6

This feedback allowed us to receive thoughts and opinions from the audiences at a different point of view since we have been solely watching from a producer and editor’s view thus may be biased towards our work. This fresh perspective will allow us to improve based on the critique we have received. From the feedback, we learned what worked well and what could be changed. Firstly, our audiences captured and interpreted the persona of the star actor well, seeing that they described her as someone passionate and determined, just as how we intended her to be. In addition to that, throughout the music video the audiences did understand the storyline quite well though there were confusions in certain parts which may be due to lack of clarity. Furthermore, people such as lower class Indonesians weren’t represented more visually where as a result, a lot of misunderstanding came from this. With this knowledge, it would then help us know effective methods on how to get our audiences to interact and engage with our media products better. 

We are going to change:

Since we did not represent lower income families as well as we had intended, we chose to highlight the themes of a mother-daughter relationship more instead. This decision is because adding more technical elements to highlight the lower class would need us to rework our entire music video and, due to deadlines, we simply do not have the time or resources to do that. Perhaps, we can discuss the star's lower class past through social media posts instead. We also realise that oftentimes, financial struggle is not often something that can often be visually obvious and so we hope that through representing her this way, we can appeal more to individuals in similar situations and be an inspiration to them through making our star more relatable. 

Conclusion:

This screen test was a useful part of our process since we had only provided audiences with a draft rather than the final product, in order to be able to create adjustments, where necessary, based on the feedback we gained. 

This will enable us to cater better to our target audience’s preferences and clear up misunderstood messages. This also helps us broaden our ideas as fresh perspectives help us open up to new possibilities. People had great suggestions for us to consider. Among these were this suggestion. 

We decided that this idea would be nice to apply as mentioned before that we would like to focus more on the mother-daughter relationship. However, minor adjustments to fit our product better will be needed such as, instead of inserting a childhood footage, we decided to just include audio overlapping the music to show the bond between our star and her mom, to add sentimental value. 

Self-Reflection:

Creating this audience feedback was quite a simple task for me as I was tasked on creating the google form with another one of my teammate Aurel while Regine edited the rough draft. I enjoyed reading through the feedbacks as not only was it from the audience's genuine first impression, it also gave my teammates and I ideas on what to change or add through the rough draft that we gave them to see. We had a few of their ideas that we wanted to apply, however due to the limited time and approaching deadline, we had to readjust them according to the resources and the time that we have. In addition to that, because what we lacked was a more accurate representation of our intended social group, lower class families, I think that we could've asked a few other people earlier so that we had more time to make necessary changes.