Portfolio Project: Project schedule

Chapter 4

Unfortunately the links I had posted on my last blog post did not upload, I will attach them here. I apologize for the inconvenience. 

Link 1:

this article

Link 2:

Pinterest

I would also like to add that to create my Pinterest board I used an app called iArtbook, it is a free resource. To create my board I used the upload a photo feature and aligned my photos to my liking.

To ensure I work efficiently and promptly, I will create a project schedule for the rest of the project. The schedule will be referenced from that of my teacher’s. I will briefly discuss what and when I intend to complete certain portions of my project. Below is my schedule, the underlined segments are the main components I will focus on. 

This video I found on YouTube regarding time management by Ali Abdaal served as a great guide as to how I should properly mange my time. I found it to be quite motivating, when Abdaal said things along the lines of what is screen shotted above; “At any given time you are doing what you most want to be doing”. To me it highlighted the significance of how much I truly have control over my time, I will do my best to avoid procrastinating and get things done by my due dates. 

Click here to view video

Week Three (2/19-2/25)

-Research and choose film opening approach (Tuesday)

-In-depth analysis of how credits are integrated (fonts) (Tuesday)

-Develop a story outline (Thursday)

-Develop script and order scenes (Saturday)

Week Four (2/26-3/3)

-Create shot list (Monday)

-Create storyboard (Wednesday)

-Research possible filming locations (how location affects tone of film) (Friday)

-Develop filming/editing schedule (Sunday)

Week Five (3/4-3/10) 

-Continue to research project components (Monday)

-Decide on mise-en-scene elements (Wednesday)

-Begin filming (Sunday)

Week Six (3/11-3/17)

-Continue production of film opening (Tuesday)

-Begin editing of film opening (Thursday) 

-Begin developing responses to CCR questions (script) (Friday)

Week Seven (3/18-3/24)

-Research information relating to creative critical reflection (Tuesday)

-Finish editing of film opening (Wednesday)

-Get peer feedback on final edit (Thursday/Friday)

Week Eight (3/25-3/31) 

-Research information relating to CCR questions (Monday)

-Create CCR projects (at least two different approaches) (Wednesday)

Week Nine (4/1-4/2)

-Create final, overall project reflection (Tuesday)

-Post project and CCR to blog (Sunday)

Portfolio Project: Character development

Chapter 3 

Reading this article, I learned essential keys to creating a character. When developing my character, I will focus on the character, how all these small factors will contribute to building one big story of a person. The background, tone, flaws, relationships, uniqueness, everything about this person must be represented clearly and united to create the protagonist. 

Focusing on making my character somewhat relatable to my audience, building a connection with my viewers by making them part of the characters’ journeys. By including routine elements, I will create a sense of relation between the audience and characters on screen. Utilizing realism will be an indispensable component.  

Everything that comes before this moment shown on screen will be how the audience understands the character. Their, the character’s, background affects everything that happens, it contains their history, flaws, likes, dislikes, and essentially everything that makes them themselves. Whether the character came from wealth or poverty could affect their style choices. 

Flaws build character, they build complexity contributing to the interest of the character. The protagonist’s flaws, along with many other factors, will be shown throughout the film. The more the audience views the film the more they learn about the character through their interactions, tone utilized, the vocabulary choice, accents, all these components will play together to develop a distinctive personality. 

Creating Catalina 

Rose, formerly known as Catalina, will be the main character, the film will revolve around her life. I chose this name because I thought it created irony seeing the name Catalina originally means pure, whereas she isn't particularly involved in the purest business. A powerful businesswoman with dangerous past. She comes from the big city of New York where she ruled before having to flee. She was involved with dangerous people and was forced to leave everything but herself behind. Now moving from the big city to a small town in hopes of starting over, she realizes her unfinished business follows. 

Catalina comes from a wealthy family in upstate New York. She typically dresses elegantly in more neutral tones or when trying to make a statement she can be seen in bold dominating colors such as red. Along with her clothes she wears accessories like jewelry, diamonds, and purses reinforcing the idea that she is from the upper class. 

 

I created this Pinterest board using various images I found on Pinterest. This board represents Catalina’s fashion and style along with some aspects of her background, like growing up in New York. 

She is well spoken, which is another indicator she has a quality education, with a slight New York accent. Her tone is powerful yet gentle, it is not doubtful but assertive. When interacting with others she is polite and mannerly, in the film she will communicate in correlation with this description.  

Applying pressure to my “hero,” AKA Catalina, I will achieve this by creating a clock. Set up a problem that must be resolved within a given time, setting the timer that will create suspense. The situation will give my hero the opportunity to rise to the occasion and let her personality shine through, making my audience want the character to succeed rooting for my character while getting to know her. The viewers will be waiting to find out what is next, if the character made it, allowing my audience to stay interested throughout the entirety of the film. 

Portfolio Project: Choosing the Genre

Chapter 2


There are so many options when choosing a genre, and honestly it was getting quite overwhelming. So, I decided to research. I came across this article, it informed me of how each genre is typically represented, for example, science-fiction is most often about the future and its technology as well as time travel.


After understanding what each genre entailed, I decided I was going to create the opening for a thriller film. The previous article had a link to another article which talked about some sub-genres within thrillers and their overall focus. I learned that the key component of any good thriller is suspense, constantly having the viewers waiting to find the next part of the story.


Like most thrillers my film would be tension building, always keeping the audience on edge wanting to find out more, not just what was going to happen but what previously had led to this very moment discovering where the character went wrong. Finally, I decided on a story. The story would be about a woman who moved to a new small town in hopes to start over. She arrives at her new place of residence to find a neatly wrapped box in her new home, waiting to be opened. She then realizes there is no outrunning the past.

I chose to incorporate this photo to represent the thriller theme. It also stood out to me, I liked the use of the bars shown, it adds visual interest and can be used to allude to future parts of the story. I will consider choosing to incorporate something similar in my piece.

Portfolio Project #1

 Chapter 1

When deciding how I wanted to approach this project, my focus reached towards those having visual interest. Specifically, development of my project through establishing background and possibly creating mystery. 

I feel the understanding of the character has to start with what happened prior to the moment highlighted and/or defining the subject on screen, by providing information significant to the character development I will have connected my audience to the film on a deeper level. I will achieve development of context through various techniques some of which incorporate dialogue, this is a possible approach  to inform the audience. Whether it be a direct confrontation to the audience, or the overhearing of a conversation. This will enable me to add multiple layers to my story, as I already have a foundation to build on, essentially engaging my viewers through more than just visualization.

Which brings me to my following point, once my audience has a relatively clear understanding I can bring along the element of mystery and/or surprise. My main thoughts are that I can achieve this through foreshadowing, or hinting of something of the past, possibly haunting my character/s, essentially posing a question. I would do this by possibly creating sounds offscreen, or if i am looking do add more of a creepy feel, possibly sudden unexpected movements in the background. This is a great way to keep my audience engaged, wanting to see the next scene.

Music marketing blog post #2

 The goal of the music marketing/brand development project was to create a plan to build a successful brand for our band, The Romantics.

My team and I started by creating research charts of two companies; Sony Music Productions, founded in 1929 by Sony Entertainment, the company that owns them; Universal Music group, founded in 1962.

For SMP we researched Doja Cat and Prince. We learnt how Doja Cats audience consists of young people and she markets her brand to them by using online platforms such as Tik tok, one of her main marketing platforms, which she uploads videos to. We too like Doja, understood the importance of recognizing what platforms our target use, Instagram (reels), Tik tok(videos), and YouTube(shorts and videos). Doja made a dance to one of her sounds which went viral and gained exposure for her brand. We learnt how she attracts her viewers by using unique eye catching colors, outfits, and props in her music videos and often too in her personal life, which allows her to constantly be marketing her brand. Our video was set in a grocery store which had colorful background, we used close ups and pans to show the products’ colorful aesthetic.

Prince used the element of surprise to attract his audience, he would do spontaneous releases. He used his signature color, purple, to brand himself. The color represented his boldness and style. We utilized this as well with our brand being associated with the colors pastel blue and pastel pink, which represented our retro pop style.

For UMG we chose to focus our case studies on Ariana grande and Carly Rae Jaspen. Grande understands her target audience, Millennials and Gen Z, they want to experience the music. Grande took advantage of this knowledge by applying it to her brand; in 2018 she released her album “Sweetner”. She had created a virtual reality in which fans would go on a sort of adventure, fans would use a selfie filter that would guide them to billboards with codes that would be used to win her merchandise. We learnt how doing this not only engaged her audience and attracted more listeners but also, with the prizes having her brand on them, promote her. We took this into account when designing our products and merch.

Carly Rae Jespen, known by her fans as Jespen, relates to her audience through her music, she makes it simple and understandable while still keeping it interesting. We attempted to do the same, stick to a simple story, act it out, and add visual interest through mise-en-scene, and how we composed and shot our shots. Just like Jespen we built a website to allow further accessiblity to the public, we included socials, music video links, concerts, and merchandise.

Having done our research we were ready to start the music video. We first chose the setting, the local Publix, this gave a more familiar feel to the video. We created our storyboard and made sure to add a balanced amount of technique, so it wouldn’t be boring nor too cluttered. Since the background would be very colorful and busy we decided on a simple outfit, we would all wear blue jeans to show unity and blue and pink shirts and accessories to represent our brand’s signature colors.

Our main distribution platform was YouTube, where we released our music video. We also used cross media convergence by offering CDs to suit our listeners preferences.

For the presentation we wanted do a recording in which we would all be talking about each slide in case one of us wanted to add on or a point was forgotten to be mentioned. So we gave it a try, unfortunately it did not work out as we lacked a quiet environment and did not have enough time. Instead each group member would present their designated slide. We decided dividing the presentation based on the ones we completed would be the best approach, considering most the slides we would be presenting would be the ones we made. We went on and each individually recorded our portions of the presentation that were later edited into one audio.

Looking back I would say we managed our time nearly perfectly, this was one of the key elements that lead us to succeed in completing everything within our given time frame. I believe we could have achieved a better outcome by dedicating more time to plan the story board. I will definitely be taking this project as a learning experience. This process was very eye openeing, I don’t think I ever really understood how much time, effort, and dedication it takes to create a campaign.

https://www.canva.com/design/DAF6pAFBDW8/6HL0hgTps5BNSBziut_cUA/edit?utm_content=DAF6pAFBDW8&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

Music Marketing

 The goal of this project was to create a campaign for newly aspiring musicians. We were given a genre and 3 songs, which fit the genre, to choose from. The task was to create a music video, using the research we would acquire as well as the case studies, that would pair with the chosen audio. This would contribute to the musician’s campaign.

One of the main challenges of this project was time management. Seeing this was such a huge project covering so much it was truly a struggle dividing the project and organizing the steps appropriately. We figured the best way to go about it would be to set a goal, brainstorm how we would get there, and then divide and conquer. How we went about this process allowed all of our opinions to be expressed while still maintaining order and completing the task at hand efficiently.

Our group had been given the genre pop/throwback, we began by choosing the song Tonight by Phoenix. After analyzing the lyrics we came up with a storytelling/promotion video story; a girl who is waiting on someone who won’t show up. To incorporate the promotional aspect as well as add visual interest we would then insert clips of the musicians, this would also better allow the audience to connect and get to know the artists. 

We then researched successful marketing and distribution campaigns that would resembled and suit ours, this gave us guidance. Applying this knowledge we began, for the aesthetics we chose the colors light blue and light pink to suit our throwback and pop theme, we made sure the font suited their style and emphasized their uniqueness. And so we planned what our website would look like.

To ensure our music would get to the right listeners we needed to understand our target audience, teenagers, being teenagers ourselves we already had an idea of ways we could distribute our music, we researched and found that our audience’s main platform used was online. Specifically platforms such as TikTok, Instagram,YouTube, Spotify, and Meta priorly know as Facebook, these were the distribution platforms our band utilized. We began to acquire knowledge regarding marketing techniques that would gain exposure which included short TikTok videos and reels on Instagram as a sort of trailer featuring the band and/or its products. We considered using other tactics such as posters(technological convergence). We also found that we could use technological convergence to our advantage by for example, gaining exposure from our merchandise and offering vinyl. We created an easy to navigate mock website which included their latest album, socials, tours, merchandise, and products which could be purchased through the website.

The Big Bang Theory is a sitcom, it is about a woman who moves in to the apartment next door to two brilliant and socially awkward physicists. She shows them a new world outside their laboratory and experiments, and eventually they develop a friendship.

 In The Big Bang Theory series, the female character by the name of Penny is portrayed as a “dumb blonde” who is the neighbor of the smart and geeky guys next door. The guys also have female scientist friends, their female friends are usually, much like them, wearing turtle necks, vests, or sweaters, whereas Penny is usually in a tank top, a v-neck top, minimal clothing, and/or form fitting clothes. Her character is meant to be outgoing and a bit more on the risky side. The clothing her character wears correlates with her personality, it is meant to further enhance her personality and how she's interpreted by the audience.

We associate the attire Penny is dressed in in a negative way, particularly it speaks to say she is reckless or unsophisticated, especially in comparison to the “smart guys”, who’s appearances rely heavily on the stereotypes of what nerd’s look like, we also think of people who fit this stereotype as smart. Formal and conservative clothing is associated with professionalism, which is why most people tend to respect those who wear it. This attire suggest one has a role of power and makes them appear serious.

In society, the clothing you wear impacts heavily on peoples opinions of you. Whether one dresses formal or casual, minimalistic or maximalist, it will always be a determinant factor of how one is perceived. Just like in the example above, people associate more modest styles with professionalism and good education, whereas more flashy/ showy pieces are known to represent poor decision making, education, or even lack of manners.