Critical Reflection

These were the questions I had to answer for my Critical Reflection Essay:

• How do your products represent social groups or issues?

• How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of 'branding'?

• How do your products engage with the audience?

• How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

Below is my Critical Reflection Essay:

The media text I created is based on the song “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd. The reason I chose this song is because I have noticed that lots of the people I know enjoy consuming alcohol, sometimes to an extent where it can be classified as substance abuse. Reading about articles related to alcohol abuse online, I have discovered that many people from all around the world engage in this activity as well, even people who are underage, such as students and even children under 10. Knowing a family member actively drinks alcohol and having to witness its drawbacks at the same time, I learned that alcohol abuse can lead a person to various health problems, such as heart failure, liver problems, and in some cases, death. I have even come across stories of people’s marriages and family bonds being broken due to their father or husband being a terrible alcoholic. I believe alcoholism is one of the main driving forces of divorce leading to broken families, because most family members who are alcoholics tend to forget their own responsibilities due to the sake of reliving their pleasures out of drinking alcohol, even to the point where they do not go to work and neglect their own family members. Due to these reasons and my dreadful first hand experience with alcoholics, I chose to base my song on “Blinding Lights” with a hint of me and my team’s own originality, telling a story with the centricity of an alcoholic and his delusions. 

As I mentioned earlier, the storyline of our music video is about an alcoholic and his delusions, more specifically, about him reliving his memories of his relationship with his past girlfriend. In reality, they are not together anymore and may never see each other again. The setting is set right after their breakup, in order to emphasise the most painful emotions, which led him to engage in excessive alcohol abuse, ultimately leading to the negative side effects — hallucinating in public. The actor also had to act wild and intoxicated, to accurately portray the undesirable side effects of a person drinking alcohol. In reality, most people engage in substance abuse after facing problems in order to alleviate the pain they are experiencing, including the depression after a breakup. Therefore, we chose the storyline to be about the actor getting intoxicated due to excessive alcohol use after having to suffer from a breakup, which reflects a dangerous coping mechanism most young adults choose to use “solve their problems”.

As our storyline focuses on the actor getting intoxicated by substance abuse, we decided to use the colour green as most toxic substances are associated with the colour green. In the movie “Snow White”, the evil queen disguises herself as a mean witch who sells apples to Snow White. Before she sold the apple, she dipped it inside a pot full of neon green liquid. As Snow White consumed the apple, she instantly collapsed, which let me come to a conclusion that the green liquid intoxicated her, hence, we used the colour green to associate alcohol intoxication with our music video, and used the colour green as a filter for most of our scenes in the music video, and also the main colour of the digipak and the social media. Moreover, radioactive substances (which are also toxic) are also coloured green, so we also used that as a reference to our excessive usage of the colour green.  As the title “Blinding Lights” suggests, we portrayed the setting to be in a venue full of lights, so we filmed the music video in the most bustling part of the city, filled with many lit up stores and cars passing by, to portray that the setting has many lights coming from many different sources. Therefore, we made use of many pictures of the city and its well lit buildings in addition to the colour green. In addition, we used the same outfit for every scene, in order to create an “iconic” outfit - a green blazer, a black collared shirt, black trousers, and black shoes. The green blazer was used to amplify the usage of the colour green to establish our branding, the black collared shirt and black trousers were chosen to represent the image that the actor just went on a formal date, which unfortunately marked the end of their relationship. Moreover, I also used the same font "PocketBall" for many of the texts in the pictures of the digipak, social media and the music video itself as the font reflects the futuristic look of the song's electro pop genre. As the font is also unique and not widely used, using this font will also make it easier for people to be reminded of the INTOXIC8 album whenever they see it being used in other aspects. In summary, we used the colour green, pictures and videos of the bustling city, used the same outfit and font to strengthen, create and establish a sense of branding.

Due to technological advancement, many people have started to use social media as a means of communication, most businesses and other artists have also used it as a way to promote their products, such as informing them of their new song releases and new merch, and also to inform them of their tour dates. I decided to use the same way to promote our media product, to promote it in social media where the audience is able to access information on our product easily. It is an efficient way for us to engage with our audience as social media allows audiences to comment on artist’s posts, allowing them to share their thoughts, preferences and new ideas to us in order for us to make media products that satisfy their needs and interests. We also get to post stories and post interactive content (such as voting for the best picture, or voting for the best song title) in order for us to gain all the feedback. In addition to the social media engagement that allows us to engage with our audience, our products also engage with the audience as many young adults suffer from relationship issues in love and engage in substance abuse to help with the emotional pain. As our media product makes use of substances, many of our audience would feel heard and understood as they relate to the issue, which establishes an emotional engagement between our media product and the audiences themselves.

I would say that our media products follow the conventions instead of challenging them. From the research I have conducted on the usual conventions of digipaks, most artists use a front cover and a back cover with elements relating to the theme of their music video. Most of them also feature the list of their songs on the back cover of their digipak, along with credits and copyright holders. The front cover of our digipak features the title, which is what most artists digipaks’ front covers contain, so we are still following the usual conventions and not challenging it. I have decided to do the same as what the other artists did for our media products so that our products would be accepted and perceived in a good light, and people would still be able to identify our media product as a digipak. As for the social media, I have published posts such as tour dates, merchandise launch, and a “coming soon” post, similar to most of the artists I have conducted research on, in order for the audiences to be able to identify us as a music producer, similar to famous artists they recognize in real life. This way, it would not be difficult for them to find our media products as we are just like the other artists they find on social media, and this increases the likelihood of us getting known as media producers, like I have mentioned earlier. In my opinion, challenging the usual conventions may put us at a higher risk of not being known as an artist because audiences are used to the conventions that other artists have set up, establishing our brand name using a different method would probably make us unable to be identified by the social media algorithm as a media producer, hence, leading us to have no audiences. Although challenging conventions such as making a unique digipak would probably increase our USP, make our media product unique and allow us to establish our own brand, some audiences might be bewildered by the bizarre design of the digipak, leading them to avoid buying our media product, which would make the launch of the media product unsuccessful. Therefore, we chose to follow the usual conventions to make our media product identifiable as the right products and not give the audiences the wrong perceptions.