Music Video Reflection

Seventeen Music Video

For this music video, my group chose the song Seventeen by Peach Pit. In this song, it talks about a seventeen year olds perspective on growing up. After listening to the song several times, we chose to focus on the life of a teen who feels separated from their friends. For the video, we wanted to show a full day of a teen hanging out with his friends and slowing feeling more excluded throughout the day. We also wanted to switch between band scenes throughout the video to show more contrast in the artistic style.

After we had a concept for our video, we began storyboarding and creating a beat sheet. Since we were producing a music video, it was important to create a beat sheet that allowed us to plan what shots we wanted to use to line up with specific phrases throughout the song. We also storyboarded the video by drawing both the band scenes as well as the friend scenes. Before we began producing the video, we also researched similar music videos and selected an image that fit the aesthetic we hoped to achieve with our video. Overall we wanted our video to have a vintage aesthetic that had bright primary colors similar to an old MTV commercial. After we had finished all pre-production planning, we began filming our video. We had 3 filming days for this video that all were around golden hour and night. Our actors were all friends of the juniors in my group and we were easily able to select a crew that were comfortable acting as friends around each other because they already were. Filming was done at a park, in a basement, and along a street. These locations were all fairly close to each other which made filming run a lot smoother. As we shot the video, we focused on first filming all the friends scenes and then finishing with the band scenes. After we finished filming, Mario worked on editing our video. Mario edited throughout the weekend and we gave feedback one day and he revised the edit. The editing process went really smoothly and I believe the editing made the video look a lot more professional.

After filming this video, I learned a variety of new skills. This video mainly helped me get to know new students in my entertainment video classroom. For this project, I worked with a group of all juniors who hadn't had the experiences to create a feature film already like I have. Since I had more experience, I had the opportunity to give more of my feedback to the ways set needed to be run and how we could make our video look more professional.

I mainly used communication, collaboration, and project management in the production of this music video. Since I worked with a new group of people, I had to get used to working with different people by using collaboration skills. I also had to use communication a lot because my group had to communicate with a cast of around 5 people and make sure they were on set every day we needed them.

If I were to do this video again I would want to film more scenes with the friends and not shoot at night at all. I really liked the band scenes in our video, I just wish we had more friend scenes to alternate between throughout the video. I also didn't like the idea of filming at night. My group really wanted to get the night aesthetic types of shots, however, achieving this look is really difficult as student filmmakers. I believe our whole video would've looked way more professional if we didn't shoot at night so that we didn't have any unnecessary grain.

However, I believe our group did a good job with casting and the editing of our video. The group of teens we casted were able to interact together really well and were all different. Having a cast that works comfortably around each other is really important and something that I want to continue in all of my videos. Our videos editing was also a super important part of the process and continuing to give the editor enough time to complete a video helps make the final product look a lot better.

After completing this project, I feel a lot more comfortable making music videos. I haven't done a music video since sophomore year and having the opportunity to create another one as a senior has helped me see how much I have learned throughout the past few years and has taught me skills I can take into my college application videos. Music videos are really similar to short films and by making 2 now, I believe I have learned a lot in storytelling and how to develop a storyline without dialogue in only 3 minutes.

Overall, having the opportunity to make another music video was really enjoyable for me and I hope to make more throughout the next year. Music videos have always been one of my favorite parts of the entertainment industry and I enjoyed the experience to work with a new group of students.