Final Promotional Package

 Final Video 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrVqu8xWExc

Final Self Reflection

 This blog is where I write my critical self reflection for the project.

Document version incase the format bugs out (note! I added pictures in the blog so the document won't have the pictures): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lgLKXfJrmpOqVmaTcL9JqLL-uCoJ0CBLg59c9A4WPgE/edit?usp=sharing

Our  products heavily incorporate handwritten fonts, which reflect our concept as high school teenagers. They're not choices purely made for the aesthetic, they also dictate the impression that we leave on our audience. We carry this visual identity over to every part of our products, from music videos to our digipak to our social media presence. Every post, every frame, and every design choice is intentional in order to set our own branding. A prime example of this is within the music video, where Hannah (acted by my partner Sharon) is placed in the corner of the screen or in a separate scene where Hannah is sat in the dark entirely. This was an intentional choice made to reflect feelings of being alone and ignored (refer to images below).

The frame where Hannah is sat in the corner reinforces her feelings of loneliness and sadness. It makes her appear small and isolated, similar to the emotions that many teens experience after a breakup. It’s a universal feeling of seeing the world move on while you feel stuck, overwhelmed by said heartbreak. The shot of Hannah sitting alone in the dark further emphasizes her isolation, especially when paired with the text messages shown on screen. She scrolls through the breakup text from Brandon (played by our media classmate Gio), it’s something so many teens can relate to; the urge to reread older messages, searching for any closure, or even just a sign that things could have gone differently. Throughout the song, I wanted to convey the idea that Hannah was being unintentionally neglected by her own friend (not in a toxic or abusive way, but in the way that sometimes happens after a breakup when others don’t fully understand your emotions.) Unfortunately, we weren’t able to film enough scenes to fully convey that idea. Though we did manage to get the locker scene. In this shot, Hannah’s friend seems eager to leave, not fully listening as Hannah tries to talk about Brandon. The intention was to show how Hannah’s pain was being downplayed, how she felt unheard in a moment when she needed support. But because we only had that one scene to express this idea that Hannah was overlooked, it didn’t have the impact I had hoped for.

Through the Instagram account we created for Hannah, we wanted to shape her image as a down-to-earth relatable artist. Unlike Taylor Swift, whose Instagram presence is more polished and professional, we aimed for something more casual and approachable. Our goal was to make Hannah feel like someone her audience could genuinely connect with, as if she was a friend. The choice of our song, High School in Jakarta, helped shape this image of Hannah. Since the song revolves around a teenage girl going through a breakup, it perfectly aligns with our social media presence. We want Hannah to feel like the kind of artist that teens and young adults can see themselves in. We also used social media to show Hannah’s silly and fun personality. We openly shared her love for dogs, and also included behind-the-scenes pictures that are personal and informal (refer to the images below). These posts are to keep the audience engaged, whilst also giving them a laugh.

One of the ways we try to engage with our audience is through Instagram’s comment section. As Hannah, we can directly interact with fans whenever they leave a comment on one of our posts. This helps build a sense of community, where fans can freely interact with Hannah herself. YouTube also serves as a great way for fan interaction through its comment section, where people can share their thoughts of the music video. Unfortunately, we ran into an issue where YouTube won’t allow us to turn comments on in the High School in Jakarta music video. Sadly, this meant that Hannah’s fans couldn’t engage with the video in the same way they could on Instagram. 

Our music video had themes of adolescence and young love, portraying the highs and lows of teenage relationships in a high school environment. It explores common experiences like peer pressure, heartbreak, and the nature of having to move on. Like most music videos with happy endings, we conformed to that convention and ended off the music video with an open ended conclusion of Hannah walking down the pier at the beach towards the ocean, assumingly to throw out the box that contains belongings that were given to her by Brandon (refer to image below). This scene shows Hannah letting go of the past and moving forward. I chose to leave it up to interpretation, allowing the audience to have their own assumptions on how the story ended.

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 their are any improvements that can be made. We decided to use google forms to create a survey to share with our audience because it makes it really easy for us to compare the answers and even provide graphs for if we use quantitative questions. Here are our questions: 

1. Choose three words to describe our artist.

2. What do you think of our social media layout?

3. What improvements can we add?

We chose these questions because we want to better understand how people view our artist and their social media character/presence. We included members of our target demographic in the screen test to ensure that the feedback we receive is appropriate. Here are the drafts that we showed audiences for the screen test: 

Here are the results from the audience feedback:

Note: an unfinished edit of our final music project was shown !

From the feedback we learned:

- our coloring could be improved/changed

- the story of our music video wasn't understood

We are going to change:

- The color tone, we plan to edit the coloring of the music video once all the clips are finalized and everything is edited into the timeline as we want to make sure all the clips have the same coloring, ensuring none of the scenes have a different setting than others.

- Even though our product isn't done and the scenes we do have are shown out of context, we had atleast hoped that it showed the main star/character was upset or heartbroken. The next time we show our product we hope most if not all audiences see the story we are trying to convey.

This screen test was a useful part of our process because:

- It helped us review over what we could change and what could be different (in this case, lighting). We think it's important for media products to be tested and reviewed before finalizing the product and just publishing/posting it, as it could result to a better product that everyone (and especially the audience) would love.

Reflection: This screen test helped us a little, however we hope the next time we do another screen test we have a little more of our project done, as our product during the time this was made wasn't done and the scenes are shown completely out of context. I (Jocy) used the results to compare to our video so far and my teammate (Sharon) made the forms and sent it out.

Post Production: Editing

 In this blogpost I (Jocy) will show my progress and experience as I edit the scenes for our music video

yt playlist of all the drafts: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLREIman2VXEPRd5Ej-aZjROtCQAFGiQgl&si=ZvgdRDMobORSuHI9

This is a playlist of each time I exported the music video in different milestones and major progresses made, I used this incase I needed to keep track of what the previous edits looked like as I go along. I used a notes app on my laptop (refer to image below) when I rewatch the previous drafts to see any changes I could make and take note of where it is in the video, this helps remind me of any important changes that I need to make as I am a rather forgetful person.

My editing software (Microsoft Clipchamp) wasn't exactly the best software to use, and it was constantly lagging, so the drafts also made it easy to check on how the end results of each change I made looked like, as the lag in the software could make it difficult to actually rewatch the video itself at times.

Production: Behind the Scenes

 Here I (Jocy) will show behind the scene photos and the scene descriptions of each one, this is to show our progress and how our filming experience went for the music video.

Over all with behind the scenes, we forgot to take actual behind the scene pictures most the time so I have to improvise and use any picture we took that day that happened to involve some filming we did (unfortunate, but better than nothing).

I used my notes app (explained in the file organization blog) to keep track of when and what scene was being recorded!

First day - 01/08/2025 || At school

pre-chorus (so1 halls - locker, sharon n kezia)

People in the shot: Kezia (our friend who played Hannah's friend)

Production: File Organisation

 In this blogpost I (Jocy) show how I organize my files for the scenes used in the music video for it to be edited.

In my file explorer, I have a seperate folder to keep all the files I transferred from my camera over to my laptop. In that folder I have a seperate folder in it for media and I organize the files via the date it was shot at.

We shot different scenes each day, and at first I thought it'd be difficult to have to rummage through all the different folders for each individual scene (not to mention the many takes it took for each one), however I recalled that in my notes app on my phone I have a list of all the scenes we need to shoot (for me as the cameraman and editor to keep track of), and I had written down the date of when we did the shooting.

Artist Persona and BRa

 My group decided on a persona for our star to be reflected in our products.

Here are some questions provided by my teacher to help us construct an identity for our star:

Here is my group's ideas:

Reflection: This task helped us lay out Hannah's identity as a whole. We got to pinpoint the little details about our artist and this will help us when creating the album covers and social media pages, as we can keep in mind how she interacts with fans, what she likes to post, whether or not her page is polished or more personal, etc. When implementing this, I will be in charge of taking the picture and my teammate will help with the visuals that will be included in the picture.