Researching Genre

 Hey, blog! I am super excited to be getting started on my portfolio project! To begin this process I wanted to explore some of the genres my partner and I are interested in pursuing our film opening. 

Today I researched the horror genre. As a big horror movie, I knew I had to at least look into the idea of creating a horror piece. 

Horror films are created to scare the audience and make people jump, some are meant to disgust and these movies fill people with anxiety. 

Some top production companies include Blumhouse Productions, and Dark Castle Entertainment, as well as more broad companies such as Universal. My personal favorite horror production company is A24 which is a very new production company that is creating amazing psychological horrors such as Midsommar and Hereditary, etc. 

I really started considering horror because I remembered my teacher telling us that horror is the cheapest genre of film to produce, which got me thinking that if done well we could make something really cool. I browsed on Reddit and quora under questions asking why horror movies are cheap but also stumbled across this super information website that I'll link below. 

One big cost for films is the location, horror movies don't have this problem because they usually take place in the woods, or an abandoned house, or just a regular house. Furthermore, the dramatic scenes in horror movies do not usually involve much dialogue, which means directors can hire less experienced actors. Another way these movies save money is that nothing is feared like "the unknown." Rather than having to create fancy costumes or high-tech CGI, things can simply be insinuated. The last aspect I want to mention is this comment, 

"Horror films, by nature, are allowed to be gritty, dirty, and raw"

-V Renée 

"Found footage" pieces are very popular and they include low-quality and shaky footage, films such as Megan is Missing which became very popular on TikTok a few years ago, as well as much bigger movies like The Blair Witch Project.

Now, obviously, as a student film, we don't even really have a budget and probably won't spend more than a few dollars, however, I mentioned all of this because all of these factors mean that this genre is students like myself can create very successfully. Our limited resources do not have an effect on this type of film.

All this being said I am still unsure if we want to create a horror film opening as my partner and I feel like we could have a lot more creativity and show a lot more skill with a different genre. So the search continues! And so does the research...

Sources:

https://rmlmedia.wordpress.com/top-10-horror-production-companies-rhys-crane/

https://nofilmschool.com/why-you-should-make-horror-movies (this is the website I mentioned)

Music Marketing Blog Post #2

Over the course of this project, I was able to learn a lot about media companies, especially those in music, market their brands and artists. I also learned a lot about time management with working on a large project like this, a skill that will definitely help me in future long-term projects, such as my Cambridge portfolio. 

The research portion of this project was one that I was surprised to enjoy, my team and I had a lot of fun researching how alternative bands market their music and how different it is from more mainstream genres like pop. Reading about Radiohead's cryptic ways of dropping music and more was something I found really fun and opened my eyes to how much I love marketing.

 In the planning process, my team and I spent a lot of time going back and forth, bouncing tons of ideas off of each other. Although this became tedious and frustrating at times, by not settling for the first idea we had, we were able to produce a video and presentation that had a lot of thought behind it and few inconsistencies. However, while brainstorming we were also quite indecisive which cut into a lot of our time, especially during class.  Because of this, we finished the project last minute. Nevertheless, the time we spent discussing the ideas we had, resulted in high-quality work. 

The first page of our storyboard for the music video

The production process was one we struggled with, although we had discussed our idea in great detail we still remained slightly unprepared on how we were going to actually produce and accurately portray the idea and concept we had. Our video focused on a man living in a simulation and living the same exact day over and over, and eventually, he gets sick of it and the video ends with the simulation being broken out. We chose this storyline to highlight the main themes in the song, 15 Step by Radiohead, which are feeling like life is passing you by and being afraid of wasting time. We really wanted to make sure this concept was portrayed in our video.

Still from our music video, our renamed title of the song

In the process of post-production, my team had to edit our video which included a green screen, and make the video look glitched in parts. The editing was pretty complex for this and took a lot of time but had an excellent impact on the video and making sure the concept was portrayed. For this step, my team and I got a lesson in time management as we had put off the editing of the video and stressed in the days before our presentation to make sure it was perfect. During this time we were also working on putting together our PowerPoint and adding all the aspects such as screenshots of the social media, website, etc. I was grateful for this experience because although stressful I gained great insight to better plan my time when it comes to the Cambridge portfolio, and not have to stress over details in the last days. 

Picture of video in Adobe Premiere, editing, before white background was added

Our presentation was the bumpiest part of this project and definitely taught my team about making sure everything is ready and working, we had many technical difficulties during the presentation. I realized when watching other presentations that a lack of preparedness for issues makes a person seem unknowledgeable and it's easy to tune out there and then. This made me understand the importance of having everything ready. Despite the technical difficulties, our presentation went well, everyone was knowledgeable when speaking, able to answer questions, and had lots to say. Thanks to how much we discussed the project and every aspect of it, all my team was familiar with every part of the brand and marketing. 

Powerpoint that we used as a primary media source in our presentation

Overall, I learned a lot during this project, and I can definitely see how it will help me with my Cambridge portfolio and with future presentations in general. This was an enjoyable experience too, one in which I was able to explore topics that interest me and discover an intrigue I have for marketing in media.

Music Marketing Blog Post #1

 My group had a lot of fun with this music marketing project. For this project, we first had to research different music production companies and some of their artists. I find marketing strategies especially those used in the media industry so interesting this was awesome. We wanted to research companies that reflected our music genre for the second part of this project, which is an alternative. Therefore, we researched XL Records and Ninja Tune. During this process, I found out a lot about obscure ways that alternative bands market their music to their target audiences so effectively. It also opened my eyes to the idea that marketing and distribution can be equally or arguably more important than the actual production of music. I am excited to look deeper into this idea as I learn more. This chart shows some of our research and how we organized this information. 

The second part of this project is to create an entire brand for an artist or band, we decided to create a band, and additionally create a music video for a song that would be the artist's first release. We selected the song "15 Step" by Radiohead out of a list of 4 songs provided to us. We are still working on this part of the project but so far we have discussed in detail our plans to uniquely market our music. This has been hard because with this being an alternative band, we wouldn't want to it be so mainstream but as it is brand new, we still need to get the word out and gain some popularity in order to be successful

We decided we would use social media to gain a following, but specifically avoiding TikTok as we felt it would not fit our brand. We will use Twitter and Instagram, furthermore, the content we post will not be directly or arrogantly advertising ourselves but instead more introducing who our brand is by showing it. We are developing this idea. 

As far as the music video goes, we wanted to create an artistic video, that really portrayed the concept of the song. One of the lyrics says "How come I ended up where I started," which is a major theme throughout the song. The song talks about the feeling of the world going by and feeling you are not doing enough or as if you are wasting time. We really wanted our video to portray this, however, we had trouble bringing our idea to life. In reflection, a different route could have been taken with the video that better showed off the knowledge we have in shots, angles, composition, etc however the route we took fits perfectly with how we want our brand to be.

Sourced from Spotify

This process so far has been a major learning experience as well as very intriguing and enjoyable, I am excited to further expand on how we will market and distribute our music.