Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Weekly Progress + Plan

This is my weekly progress for the documentary project. This progress report will allow me to evaluate and reflect what I did as well as what I could improve throughout the weeks. I also made a plan as a reminder on what tasks I should complete according to plan.

WeekStart DateTaskBlogpost TitleContentDeadline
W1
30 September
Pre Production
Research
1Brief
2Team
3Weekly Progress
4Preliminary ResearchBroad genre researchW3
W2
7 October
Research
5Research: IndustryWho makes music videos?W3
W3
14 October
Research
6Research: GenreCodes and Conventions of your genreW4
W4
21 October
Plan
7Statement of IntentYour initial proposalW5
8Theory of Stardom: Richard DyerA summary of the class, plus your exampleW7
W5
28 October
Plan
9MoodboardYour visual styleW7
10Lyric SheetBreakdown your song into scenesW7
11StoryboardShot by shot planW7
W6
4 November
Plan
12Song ResearchBackground of your songW7
13Screen Teststar auditionsW7
14ClassworkHow to: Camera, MeS, Sound, EditW7
W7
11 November
Plan
15Location scout & Risk AssessmentW7
16Filming ScheduleFilm over the break?W7
W7

Week 1 
In week 1, we did a preliminary research on different genres of music videos. This will help me to understand and analyse what makes different music genres distinct from one another. The teacher also explained us briefly regarding what are we going to learn throughout the term as well as the brief for the music video project that we are going to make. Furthermore, my teacher also explained about the timeframe of the lesson and the syllabus, this helped me to understand and expect the things that I will learn throughout the term and familiarise with it. We were also told to form our groups, which took some time due to difficulties in securing members of the group or the different paths we intend to take. Finally, I decided to join my former group, and I'm very excited to work with them because I know they're all hard workers and we frequently share similar ideas. We then started to research on industries that create our intended music genre at the moment, pop. However, this genre selection is still not fixed yet and so we will try to finalise the genre by next week.

Week 2 
During week 2, we have started our research on our genre, which consists of 2 big research and 8 small research on music videos. The research has always been one of the most time consuming task especially when I tend to overanalyse. Hence, I need to manage my time wisely so that I can finish it on time by working on them overtime so that I don't need to cram before the due date. My group and I had been contemplating whether choosing the genre indie pop was a good idea because pop is too broad for us and indie is too niche. It was a little confusing when we did our research on indie pop music videos, so at the end of this week, we ultimately settled on pop genreOther than that, we created a document to write our rough ideas individually for the music video so that next week it will be easier for our to brainstorm and discuss the final concept. 

Week 3
In week 3, the approaching deadline for genre research heightens my awareness, especially since I have so many other responsibilities and busyness outside of media studies class, so I need to better organise these various tasks. As I know there will be more upcoming tasks, I know I need to keep track of my work, so I created a planner schedule that allows me to see how much I've done and which ones I need to complete as soon as possible. Aside from that, I needed to boost my motivation to complete my genre study, so I tried to convince myself that this is a fun task, and after all, I enjoyed the process. 



Week 4
This week, we started on our statement of intent. Because we have already have our initial concepts on our music video, this eases us in finishing the statement of intent. Additionally, we were introduced by our teacher to the Theory of Stardom by Richard Dyer as a classwork, this will help us in creating our star persona later on and I learned many valuable knowledge regarding how celebrities are intentionally constructed to target their audience and promote their product, hence I hope that me and my group can build our star persona carefully and with consideration so that we can achieve so. 

Week 5 
During week 5, we began creating a moodboard for our music video and started working on the lyric sheet. Creating a moodboard is enjoyable because we can arrange images that correspond to our vision into a collage; nevertheless, it appears cluttered and quite messy in the moment, and we intend to fix this later. We started annotating the lyric sheet on paper but decided to transfer it digitally because it is more effective and easier to collaborate and annotate our ideas and notes. We don't have a final clear plan for how our music video will run from start to finish, but we do have a vision concept, therefore we'll use our free time to discuss it. 

Week 6
Week 6 was a full project class, so we tried to use our time wisely to complete our lyric sheet, which took so long due to changing concepts and ideas. I also attempted to finalise and complete other blogposts so that I would have less work to do the following week and could avoid stress and burnout. Furthermore, as a class, we held a screen test to determine the suitability of the actors for our music video; although we did not find anyone for our main star, we used some of the screen test participants as side or supporting characters in our narrative. The screen test made it more enjoyable and temporarily distracted me from my hectic and stressful schedule. 

Week 7
For our final week of term 2 (pre-production deadline), we have to finalise all of our blogposts in the pre-production stage. Since we are almost finished with our lyric sheet, we asked for our teacher's ideas to our narrative, and he gave us really good ideas and references that we could use. Because we took longer than expected to finalise our lyric sheet, I needed to finish the storyboard quickly (which I did faster than I had anticipated), as well as my teammates' location scout and risk assessment. This week has been pretty hectic because I have tests every day of the week, so time management is critical in completing all of my work on time while also producing high-quality content. We also had different actors in mind for our music video cast, so we planned to conduct screen tests as soon as possible and then move on to creating the filming schedule to organise all of our schedules so we could shoot immediately; possibly over the holidays, and I hope everything will run smoothly. 

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━•❃°•° Self reflection: Pre-Production °•°❃ •━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓

Creating a weekly progress and plan is immensely beneficial for me as it ensures that my progress throughout my pre-production is on track and as a reminder on what tasks I should complete according to plan. For each week, I included what I've done, what problems I've encountered, solutions to overcome the problem, and what I needed to finish or do for the following week. Throughout the term, I discovered that making a weekly progress and plan and consistently filling them up every week has increased my accountability to complete tasks on time especially in a group and evaluating how well I performed in completing the tasks. I gradually came to understand how important this blog page is as it keeps an eye on everything I've done and what I should accomplish, especially when a deadline is approaching. Nevertheless, I would like to improve my weekly progress and plan for next semester by separating the to-do list (in bullet points or checklists) among the others so that it is easier for me to go back to it again without having to read everything from the beginning of the paragraph. 

┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━•   ❃°•°❀°•°❃   •━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

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