Critical Reflection Questions

 1. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

This music video, while not directly targeted at a specific demographic or audience, in my opinion would be more enjoyed by teen or young adult audiences. The song in the video will more likely be familiar to them compared to older or much younger viewers, as the song was released in 2004. The music video is also dark in tone, and has a sad ending, which will make it more enjoyable for people who like tragic stories. In a more broad sense, to enjoy this video one would also have to be interested in the way music videos incorporate storytelling through only song lyrics and visuals on screen. Liking the band that plays the song or a genre of music video is only a subset of people who like watching story driven music videos themselves. They will need to be able to figure out what the story is without it being told to them directly, also with the lyrics of the song only vaguely relating to the visuals. Getting this will be the key to appreciating this video along with other videos like it.

2. How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

It will be distributed in the same way that most music videos are published, through YouTube. People would be able to view the video through YouTube's search or recommended tabs, and that is how it will gain attention and views. Audiences would be engaged through the relatable nature of the music video's tone and the nostalgia factor of the song chosen. The most impactful scene keeps the pace with the climax of the song, which continues to engage viewers throughout the middle and end of the video. After this scene, the more somber tone of the flashbacks will have the viewers feel what the character in the video is feeling. The ending leaves the audience with questions, and the cliffhanger leaves a lot up in the air, making viewers invested even after the video is over.

3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

It seems like I will always make great improvements with every new project. Something new will come up in the editing process and I will figure out how to do it, increasing my knowledge. And with practice, I've gotten better at things I already knew how to do. For example, I needed to zoom in on one of the video clips because the shot was taken from too far away. I found out a way to increase the scale past 1.00 and zoom in at whatever point I wanted to, not just the middle. These individual learning experiences are helping my production skills develop and also make me enjoy every time I have to edit for something. During the music video editing, I had around 10 seconds to fill in the middle of the video with an array of scenes to choose from. Cutting up those scenes and trying to figure out what parts to use in what order was enjoyable for me to work on, and it helped me improve on pacing and how the same scene from different angles can be structured. I can only imagine that my editing skills will continue to improve with each new project.

4. How did you integrate technologies-software, hardware, and online-in this project?

During the research portion I looked at various YouTube music videos, and once we got the idea of the type of music video we wanted to make, I looked at music videos with darker tones. This is when we decided on Boulevard of Broken Dreams. After the rest of the planning was finished, all of the scenes were filmed on Grant's phone, and later emailed to me. I dumped the files on the desktop and put them into OpenShot, where I did the editing. After editing, all that was left was to upload the finished product onto YouTube.