Elle Qui Pleure - A Retrospective on Self Love

 

    Hi aice, if you're reading this, I decided to keep my blog around to talk about my future endeavors. Feel free to read or not read; the rest of these posts will not be written as part of my exam material.

    To the rest, this post is about what I learned from acting in the short film "Elle Qui Pleure" directed by my wonderful friend Isa. Since I was working on this film at the same time as a good like 3 or 4 others, the lessons I learned here mostly bleed into the ones I'll go into more depth on in future posts. For example, I learned some real good time management when scheduling shoots (because I /had/ to), I generally upped my level of promptness and professionalism, and blah blah blah enough about me.

    I kind of lied to you. This post is actually about what I learned from watching *Isa* make her short film. In the beginning of the year, we had a brand identity project that I had written about in earlier posts. Isa's brand identity was sweet, with a focus on art and love. Through the creation of this short film I noticed not only the way this piece continued to authentically build her original brand identity, but also her growth as an artist.

    Okay, I really did lie to you. This is just an Isa appreciation post. In the beginning of the year, Isabella Coronel's brand was drawn around neutral colors, a welcoming ambience, and an appreciation for art. When asked to describe the purpose of her brand, she responded "to love." I think this project well encompasses that brand identity from multiple fronts. Aesthetically, the soft classical music and clean minimal design of the film and it's postcard carry forward the original brand. When it comes to subject matter, creating a story about a girl who learns self love through art hits the nail on the head of what she wanted her brand to be all about. These are both connections she made in a blog post of hers. Where her analysis falls short, however, is something I want to address myself. The film may have solidified the brand's theme of self love with it's story, but I also think that it's creation was able to solidify a bit of self acceptance within its creator herself. 

    When explaining her brand's relationship to an audience, Isa carried herself as a Friend, a Helper, and a Good Listener. In the beginning of the project, she would always mention how she liked to *help* me and some of our other friends with projects she thought were really cool. This time, though, the project was all her own. Through the production process, I could see when Isa was stressed about getting it done, when she was unsure of what to do on set, when she wasn't confident that her ideas were good or would come to fruition. By our last day of filming, though, I saw her quickly problem solving, asking for less advice, and giving me directions with more confidence. In the end, she planned and executed a film not only on time but to a level on par with the work of the peers she looked up to months prior. 

    We're all real proud of you, Isa. Don't doubt yourself for a second.

Final Project components

 The day has come.

Here is a link to the music video

Here are some pictures of my final digipak

[inside up]

[outside up]

Inside the "Lyrics" (inner left) panel is a pocket which will contain a folded copy of the love letter that Nik received in the music video:

And here is a link to a presentation showcasing my social media

(since the song is not officially released yet, I can't make the social media public)

Critical Reflection

           The music video for “I Don’t Wanna Wanna” by Playkill* works alongside its social media presence and limited CD digipak to create a light-hearted and humorous exploration of relationships gone sour.

The three components work to communicate one consistent brand both through stylistic and emotional means. For instance, the entire project uses the same font and colors throughout, and the image of tomatoes permeates the piece, whether through emojis, iconography, or the real thing. The content for every component was derived from the same shoot, so there is consistent reference to the same grassy field, costumes, and props. Moreover, the video and social media mirror each other in emotionally evoking the light-hearted theme. Where the video plays an upbeat track with saturated imagery, the social media content incorporates funny outtakes and popularly memed songs.

In creating a fun indie rock video, I utilized research into bands with similar audiences, within the same genre, and some that were local to the same area. Most notably, the music videos for “Shampoo Bottles” by Peach Pit and “Daddy Dookie Brown” by Mustard Service inspired the use of whimsical parallel storylines, colorful grading, and noticeably bad special effects within the piece. The approach to social media was not without its inspiration either, coming as a culmination of techniques and posting regimens that I gathered to be most successful from other local bands like Mustard Service, The Haunt, and Dirty Rivals. Conversational captioning, signature emojis, and upcoming show reminders were elements seen on band accounts across the board, but there were also some conventions I did not follow. For example, I chose to use hashtags as a means to reach a wider audience, even though many artists shy away from using them. At the sacrifice of a more consistent feed, I also placed show flyers up front in posts rather than in a carousel of pictures of the band members in order to ensure that they could be easily found by someone scrolling past. 

As a genre, indie rock is known to be more progressive than many others due to its nature as an alternative for less conventionally advantaged people. However, every woman in this music video fits under the stereotypical “psycho girlfriend” trope, which is more reductive than is conventional. Due to the scenarios occurring within the imaginations of cishet men, the female characters serve more as elements of the environment that the band members must navigate than as characters themselves. This idea of male the fantasy of women is further reinforced by the fact that male friends of the band members were costumed in order to portray their own interpretation of women rather than actually having women in the roles.

For this reason, the target audience of the video is limited to being predominantly men. It also closes itself off to potential queer viewership in the way that it reinforces gender binaries by assigning certain clothing as expressions of womanhood. In any case where humor is combined with cisgender men dressing in traditionally feminine clothing for any reason other than earnest gender expression, there lies the silent implication that failure to engage in traditional masculinity is humiliating and comedic, an idea that queer youth have heard all too often against them. Aside from those limiting factors, the video shares its target audience with that of indie rock and local music enthusiasts. People ages 16-22 who might be avid consumers of alternative media and fashion, and who likely enjoy supporting local and sustainable pursuits. 

This target audience is engaged through the social media page, as Instagram is the second most common form of social media for generation Z, behind only YouTube, which is where the music video will be posted. Within the instagram content, hashtags with small post counts are used to target a specific audience, and songs currently on trend within our genre and on tiktok are used to boost visibility. Posting reels was also a strategic choice knowing that Instagram pushes them out to compete with TikTok, the fastest growing platform among generation Z. We also held a raffle for the digipak that would simultaneously generate shares and give feedback as to what content our followers like best.

The digipak serves as a physical representation of the video and overall ambience created in idww. In the postmodern era, this physical consumable thing representative of one’s tastes is of high sign exchange value, especially to a target audience that has grown up entirely within consumerism. Furthermore, since it is a one of one copy, the target audience for this particular genre would be especially enticed to participate in the competition, knowing how much the indie genre values that which is individual and unique. Therefore, the raffle accomplishes goals for both the band and the audience.

Overall, I am proud of how my project components turned out and the skills I was able to acquire along the way, but I lament that I couldn’t fully realize my ambitions within the timeframe or communicate the extent to which I researched and made thoughtful decisions within my blog. Since this project was my first experience working with a client, and one more established than myself at that, I prioritized making my media components the best that I could. As a result, my blog, something I had a lot of fun with in AS level, suffered immensely. Coordinating filming dates with a group of seven that live an hour away was something that I didn’t give much thought to at the inception of the project, and proved difficult. This resulted in much less time allocated to editing than I had initially planned, leaving some elements like timing and color grading to lack consistency from one scene to the next and fail to establish an overall aesthetic akin to my inspirations. I do, however, plan to continue making tweaks after receiving a second round of feedback from the band in order to create the best iteration of the video as possible for their scheduled april 29th release date. 

Timing, Timing, Timing

 

    Back in the beginning of this project, our teacher showed us this example music video project from a past year. One of the things she made sure to mention was that audio-syncing for music videos would be a real pain to do accurately. Luckily, I thought to myself, my video includes mostly scenes without the band members singing along, which would save me some struggle.

    This did not save me some struggle.

    While I did have to sync the band members singing for a few scenes, this proved not to be too difficult since we recorded with a speaker playing the song and they kept pretty consistently with time. All I had to do was match up the very first part of the clip and let it go from there. 

     What really brought some struggle, though, was the overall pacing of the piece. I needed to fit certain scenes into a designated portion of the song, and also wanted to do my best to have any important movement fall properly on a beat. I also sifted through a lot of footage of different takes and angles for every shot to try and include the best combination of shots that would be consistent between each other and provide some visual intrigue, making sure that switches in angle would occur on reasonable beats and content in frame would align with the cut.

     This meant a good amount of slowing down, speeding up, (both of which irked me for fear of messing with the frame rate, by the way, but that's a conflict for a later post) and shifting around multiple layers sometimes by a single frame. But hey, what can I say

     It be like that

Filming "Under Construction"

  Here's another project I haven't mentioned:

       Today after school, I filmed with my friend Sabrina for her short, "Under Construction." 

    Filming ran a bit later than I expected, so I fell totally asleep as soon as I got home without making some progress on my own social media content first, but that's okay. At this point, I expect it to always happen and plan accordingly.

    Although at times it's stressful to think that I've involved myself in so many projects when I really didn't have to, I know mine and my friends projects will all turn out great in the end. Honestly, I like to appreciate any opportunity I get to soak up as much experience in different fields as I can, and working on other people's projects still lets me learn new things about the production process.

    For example, when filming with Sabrina today, we used a boom mic to record the necessary audio. I've never done that before. I also like to work with others to see what their thought process is like when producing a scene, because everyone has their own methods that are effective for them, or thinks to incorporate/consider certain things that I wouldn't have thought of. My friend Isa Chiappini, for instance, would always think about getting certain alternate or extra shots while on set whereas my mind would be very by-the-book.. or I guess by-the-checklist. 

    Truthfully, I'm not very stressed about working on other projects. It's been grounding to know that once this deadline passes, there will be an arsenal of creative projects that I will be really proud of.  

    As for the other projects I still haven't mentioned, maybe I'll talk about them some more in later posts. Or maybe you'll happen to be grading them and think "oh hey that's that girl."

    That'd be pretty cool.

Filming Elle qui Pleure

 Hi, 

     in all my havoc I've neglected to tell you about some other aice media work I've been doing. I never really mentioned it until now since I didn't think it was relevant to my own project, but I've noticed that my friends sometimes post about collaboration between each other, so I thought I'd let you know.

     Aside from my own music video, I have main roles in three of my friends projects, and an appearance in a fourth.

     Why would I accept all of those commitments, you may ask?

     That's a really good question.

     Anyway, today was the last day of filming for my friend Isabella's short, "Elle Qui Pleure"

    

[me, covered in paint]

    I also did a lot of work on my social media and editing today that I'll go more in depth on in a later post.

Ethan's Highlight

 

Click on the image to view my google slide about Ethan's Highlight (the video is too large to add on blogger)