Critical reflection

Q1. How does your project represent social

groups or issues?

Ans: The song we chose for our music video, Mr. Kitty's "0% Angel," revolves around the idea of how heartbreak can

drive a person to their lowest point and force them to act in ways they ordinarily wouldn't. We chose a social group that is representative of late adolescence and early adulthood for our music video. As I continue, some of the problems we raised included how melancholy and depression can cause a person to experience both mental and physical agony; to illustrate this, the main character's heart is shown bleeding at the conclusion of our music video. In addition, we highlight how even males struggle to understand their feelings while being portrayed as "strong," "masculine," and "nonchalant," and how betrayal, heartache, and disappointment may consume them from the inside out.

When we zoom into his head and show the

recollections of his memories, he is shown with his beloved, where he is depicted happy, ecstatic, and at peace. Our actor is seen in a permanent state of grief throughout the video. From the beginning to the conclusion, we used various types of lighting to make our concept come to life. When he is by himself, the light dims and he is surrounded by a depressing aura. However, when we look at his recollections of her, the lighting takes on a dreamlike quality, showing how comfortable, at ease, and peaceful he felt with her.

Q2. How do elements of your production work together to make a sense of "branding"?

Ans: To build a sense of branding, we had a choice of options. Throughout the entire process, both internal and external variables were at play. About the interior elements, they revolve around the camera angles, editing, stances, and color scheme and are all combined to give us a feeling of branding.

This was accomplished by maintaining a different yet consistent color scheme throughout our product as well as conventions to preserve the overall appearance. For example, the beginning used a variety of red and blue hues mixed together, while the forest used a filter-like green shade and the memories used a dreamy pink shade. Going on, we gave it a thrilling element and created an unusual atmosphere for it, drawing inspiration from the album cover of Mr. Kitty. Our team worked hard to give it our unique identity and recognition, something that clearly demonstrates our vision, and something that makes it stand out from other forms of media.

When it comes to the outside variables, we used our social media pages to promote our music video, released teasers and snippets, and published a lot of photographs leading up to the release of our finished product.

This helped us attract attention and a lot of excited replies waiting for the video. To match our final cut, we kept our red theme throughout our campaign. Our product generated a lot of involvement on social media sites, which helped us establish the identity of our project and its creation.

Q3. How do your products engage with the audience?

The targeted audience for our product was late teens and early adults, but it has no specific age limit, we highlighted how heartbreak can lead to depression. It was made to not only be enjoyed by the 'relatable audience' but also by the youth to enhance the essence of bittersweet love.

Regarding the psychographic and demographics factor, it holds no specific limitation or any set criteria for our audience despite the portrayal of how a man can go through various stages of grief after a hefty breakup, or issues regarding depression. The theme of heartbreak cannot be generalized since everyone at one point in their life faces the dark side of love. Moreover, the conventions of our product stand out as an aesthetically pleasing video, we used different lights and settings to show a storyline and to keep the audience's attention on it. We added an element of suspense, build up and the result, in the end the main character's heart bleeding used as a metaphor to show how heartbreak can lead to all sorts of distress. The color-scheme was set to catch attention, not too light and not too bright on the eyes, something that keeps the watcher engaged and interested. We implemented Stuart Hall's theory about Audience Reception, to cater to all sorts of audience. Our social media platform served as a huge factor in keeping our viewers engaged, it kept the watchers on their tiptoes for the release of the final video and a lot of thrill was build up for  it.

Q4. How did your research form your products and the way the use or challenge conventions?

For our project, we were inspired by Mr. Kitty's aesthetic and took inspiration from a lot of social media platforms. We wanted our theme to maintain the dark yet subtle look. We did not want the project to be too over-whelming or too under-whelming, and to achieve that we had to make sure all our research added up properly.

The theme of our music video falls under the category of alternative/indie, and to get to that we looked at different clips and music videos to get a good gist of it. For our color-grading scheme in the start of the video we took inspiration from, 'Blinding Lights' by The Weeknd, the themes of red and orange that he showcased in his video was something that we had been looking for. For our digipak, we looked at Mr.Kitty's album cover, where he is seen hugging a skeleton and the background is red, we tried to portray our digipak in a similar way like him. To give it the dark look we wanted, we used different editing techniques. We, also used different font styles and keep it in the same aura of our music video, to provide a sense of coherence.