The Music Marketing Project has come to an end. From my experience, I have learned a lot more about the research, planning, production, post-production, and presenting process which will be greatly helpful while doing my Cambridge Portfolio Project.
Research:
From this project, I learned the importance of researching the topic that will be discussed and how in doing so the later steps will become much easier. For this project, my group and I were assigned the song She Will Be Loved by Maroon 5, which I had never heard of before, as well as the genre Pop, which I had not listened to in about 3-5 years. Due to my lack of knowledge of the subject matter I had to do some research on the topic. So I decided along with my group to look into the current most trending Pop artists like Harry Styles and Taylor Swift to see what they are doing right and how to incorporate those strategies into my own brand to make it successful. We organized all this information on a chart about their marketing and distribution which we later used to develop our own brand's marketing and distribution plan. Suffice it to say the research helped to make the later parts of the project go easier and I will make sure to do research for later projects.
One of the research charts we did involving Harry Styles and his practices along with other artists part of Universal Music Group.
Planning:
From this project, I learned the importance of laying out a proper plan before starting to work on any other steps of the production. One part of the planning that I will incorporate in future projects is a schedule for the steps of the assignment so the work seems more manageable with all the requirements laid out with assigned dates in which to complete them so the work seems less daunting and can steadily be done to achieve a great final product. We did this in our project by laying the dates out in a Google Doc with loose dates for the parts to be completed. I will say I would also like to do this when I do my Portfolio Project but keep stricter dates for myself and my potential group so that the process goes extremely smoothly and I am more motivated to get the work done because during the project due to the loose dates, I let myself get lazy and fall behind.
Rough schedule developed during the planning for our project.
Another amazingly useful aspect of the planning I did for this project that I want to carry over is storyboarding. Storyboarding aids in helping to see a visual representation of the story that will be created and allows for the later production stages to be more smooth as all the shots, angles, etc are laid out. We did this for our project quite early on and it helped to make sure our video shooting process was done with minimal hiccups. Finally, the last part of the planning process that I learned is important is developing an idea of what exactly you want to do and what you want to show in your production early on. I learned this not through doing it early on but by suffering from not doing it early. We did not discuss the brand until close to the end of the project so our ideas were muddled and we had to then base the brand off the music video which worked out fine but if we had thought about this earlier it would have gone much smoother. So from the Music Marketing Project, my main takeaway is that planning is probably the most essential part of the production to ensure a steady and easy flow for the rest of the process and that I would focus on the aspects of planning said above the make sure that my planning for later projects goes smoothly.
Page of the Storyboard illustrating our plan for the music video.
Production:
The production process for this project mainly consisted of 2 aspects: the music video and the presentation. The music video production went smoothly for the most part. The weather on the day of was beautiful and fit the aesthetic we were going for with the video and everyone who was meant to show up showed up allowing everything to be filmed. The only mishap was that for the filming the date got pushed back for no apparent reason leading to the post-production being delayed which hurt the schedule and made us rush more, also for the filming the date feel upon an unfavorable date for me with Miami marathon volunteering not allowing me to show up and monitor the process which I would have liked to do, finally, we did not end up getting enough footage to fill up the whole song time like we had planned which did not hurt the video too much but made us veer off the plan which is never good. So going forward I will make sure to plan around when I can be present for the filming of any project so that I can direct the process and better control of the situation to prevent any mishaps to happen like not getting enough footage.
Music Video Frame showing the proper lighting due to good conditions.
For the presentation, as stated earlier, we had to do it quite last second and had to be quite generic with a lot of the aspects focusing on typical tropes of pop like love (a heart being our symbol) but since our song was surrounding that topic anyway it worked out. I want to make sure I have time to develop my idea for the ascetic and brand of any project going forward to make sure it is not generic going forward. We also experienced some electronic problems like the slides glitching out and not syncing properly especially with the music video so which caused many errors. Going forward I plan to never put a video onto PowerPoint itself and instead use other platforms made for video to stop further issues related to technology. Otherwise of this, our PowerPoint production went well. We had great images aiding in illustrating the information on the slide, we had all the requirements on the rubric like examples, and we presented a decent view of what the brand we are like that may entice buyers. What I took out of the production process of this project is that mishaps will happen while working I just need to allow myself time to fix these errors and work out the kinks to make sure that they do not persist in the final product.
Brand Logo showing emphasis on classic pop trope of love.
Slide with examples, show don't tell, kept engagement of the audience.
Post-Production:
From the Post-Production process of the project, I learned to communicate with my group, bouncing ideas on how to represent ideas and how to present, and how meticulous review is essential in creating a great final product. For this project, the post-production process was mostly editing and also involved some practicing of the slides for presentation. The presenting practice portion of the post-production was fairly simple and easy it just involved allocating slides and rehearing them to ourselves at home before the day which was fairly simple. The editing, however, was not so simple. As stated earlier I was not there on the day of presenting due to a delay in the initial date which also stopped me from getting the SD card to edit the video with so my groupmate said he would edit it. But he had little experience so we frequently got on calls to discuss how to edit the video and what would work best. We went through about 4 different versions before going with the version in our presentation. The initial version was just the shots together, the 2nd version was with a rough greyscale over most of the video that would fade as happiness is achieved, the 3rd version was a greyscale starting partway through, the 4th version was nearly it with a greyscale representing the male's depression of seeing her with someone else thinking how he could treat her better, and finally, the last version was like the 4th version bit with an effect to present and remove the greyscale. This process of aiding in the editing and sending files to one another helped me to understand why communication is so important in post-production and how meticulous review of the product is essential in making something that you can be proud of. These 2 skills are ones I will be taking when I move on to my Portfolio Project.
Screenshot of the editing panel used with the different versions and final version on the timeline.
Presentation:
For the presentation itself, it went very smoothly it looked like my group and I had reviewed our slides enough to seem like we knew what we were talking about up in front of the class. we were able to go through with minimal kinks except for the music video not starting which is not the biggest issue since we got it to work. I can fix this by making the interface easier by using a link instead or manning the presentation myself. We did not exceed the time limit and we got everything that we wanted to say out in the time we were up there so overall, I found this part to be solid despite me being a bit nervous in front of the class which I definitely need to improve on.
Overall Reflection:
Over the course of this project, I learned many great tools for my later projects including my Portfolio project in all steps of the process: research, planning, production, post-production, and presentation. For Research the most important takeaway was that I should always look into whatever I am doing beforehand so my process, later on, will go smoother as I will be more knowledgeable. For Planning the biggest takeaway was to have a story layout and a schedule to stick to in order to stay on track and make later parts of the production easier. For Production I learned to give myself a longer window to ensure whatever is done during this portion is perfect or as close to that as possible since I cannot get this time back. For Post-Production I learned that communication and review are essential in producing a great final product in the end. Finally, for the Presentation, I learned that I should get better at speaking in front of a crowd to allow my ideas to flow out easier. All the things I learned from his project listed above will be essential for my Portfolio project where all these skills should come in handy eventually and lead to my success.
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