“How can you find, explore, and expand your passion?“
Exploring Music Videos
For our explorations unit, we were challenged to explore a passion of ours and improve on a particular skill set that addresses our 21st Century Skills. I chose to explore the process of making a music video. The reason I chose this was because I wanted to make a compilation of all the memories I’ve made in high school so far. This includes selfies, group photos, and all kinds of funny or nostalgic videos. Now, you may be thinking: How is this a music video? There are multiple different aspects to the art. The main aspect many typically refer to is making movies with professional cameras, gear, and other equipment. This incorporates tons of lip syncing, choreographed dancing, and a wide variety of actors or professionals. Of course, while the quality of my clips might not be up to standards, and the fact that I don’t have any lip syncing or professional dancing, I believe the idea and appeal is the same. The aspect I think the majority of people do not look to is telling the story of daily life. These are the unplanned, unprofessional, and real events that are usually taken with phones or small digital cameras without massive and expensive setups.
This translates into the 21st Century Skills – risk taking. This project as a whole was a risky one, because as stated earlier, the idea is a little more vague when it comes to a real music video. Additionally, the content might not be conventional or popular, which gave me more to think about while I was producing the video.
The Process
So what exactly went into the production? First of all, I started by finding all of the images and videos I wanted to use, which required an impatiently long amount of time searching through my camera roll. After finding my content, I had to find the actual music I wanted to use, and I decided I wanted a funky, throwback pop song most people would recognize and enjoy. The next step was figuring out where I should place images and videos, editing on Premiere Pro of course. This included linking up certain lyrics to images, studying the soundwaves of the audio, and cutting long videos into shorter clips to be used.
While I don’t have the talent to make good music, I definitely enjoyed it and had the tools to create an enjoyable music video. I wanted to make this video into something that engages not only me, but the viewers as well. I hope to put a smile on someone’s face, through either the music or the visuals. Music videos are a form of media, film, and entertainment that everyone watches. If you look on Youtube, the most viewed videos are always music videos. While some of those may be repeated views, music has such a wide spread on so many people everywhere. Obviously, I’m not looking to reach the level that reaches hundreds of millions of people, but it would be nice to create something captivating. The final product is below.
Some of the things I value from the Explorations Project was getting the chance to make such a video in the first place. Instead of having to order a photo book, or go through thousands and thousands of pictures in my camera roll, I can look at this video. As a digital artist, my visual editing skills have improved as well as my ability to story-tell using images and videos.
Experimental Music
Our experimental music unit was our final big project in Digital Media class. We were tasked to create a song using virtual instruments in Pro Tools. However, there is a twist – this song would be experimental, meaning it could be quite literally whatever we want, as long as it incorporates the instruments. Editing and creating on Pro Tools has been a challenge for me, as there are a multitude of different tools, buttons, and interfaces. The image below shows how the editing process looks.
My inspiration for this music were some of the songs I like to listen to, and also my musically talented friends. I wanted to make an effort to recreate such songs, which unfortunately I don’t think I reached the level of. However, it was fun trying out and listening to many new sounds using all the Virtual Instruments available to me on Pro Tools. I value being able to use this application to play all sorts of music without having to spend money on the actual tangible instruments.
Producing an experimental piece of music was actually a lot more fun then a standard piece. This is because I could play whatever instrument I wanted, whatever I thought sounded cool, or choose whatever order I wanted sounds to play. Of course, the process became frustrating at points, due to all the things I had to keep track of, but it came out as a fine and weird piece of experimental music. You can listen to it below.