Project Reflection
My project began with the selection of genre. My group nominated me as the person to go up and draw our genre from the lot. We drew the rock genre. With this, we began the research phase of our project. We studied two music companies and four rock artists, two per company. Our research would be the foundation for the marketing strategies we would choose when we started building our brand, so it was crucial that our research was in-depth and representative of the rock genre as a whole.
The four case studies we did were Kaleo, John Harvie, Bon Jovi, and Imagine Dragons. My group and I felt that these artists represented many of the facets of rock music. Our research focused heavily on how these artists promote their music and grow their brands. We learned that there is an emphasis on social media promotion, especially among young, up-and-coming artists, as this is a cheap and effective way to reach a large audience and potentially go viral and garner instant success.
Once we had completed our research, it was time to decide what we wanted our brand to be. After deliberating, we decided that our best choice was to create a young solo artist, just breaking into the music industry. We wanted to focus on social media and growing the brand in organic ways that would build a connection with fans.
At this stage we had a basic idea of our artist, we chose our song, Mother Mother by Tracy Bonham, and began the planning process for our music video. The first step was to decide what type of video we wanted to create. Whatever we chose had to capture our brand and the song the best, therefore we chose a mix of a promotional and storytelling music video. Our next step was to storyboard the music video. Since we had a storytelling aspect to the video, this step was crucial to getting everyone on the same page and making filming days as flawless and efficient as possible. We wrote out the basic story we wanted to tell and planned the music video frame by frame, creating a visual map of what our video would look like once completed. Not only would this storyboard come in handy while filming, but it would make editing the video much faster and easier, so this was probably one of the most important steps in the entire creation of our project.
Now that we had the research and the storyboard done, we set two days for filming outside of school and allocated all in-class time to work on our presentation. We designated a Thursday after school and that Sunday to film the entire project. When Thursday rolled around, everyone met at our cinematographer, Male's, house to film a lot of the storytelling aspect. In this portion of the project, it was my job to act in the music video as the mom. We spent the day collecting shot after shot of Nati, our star, running out of the house, running down the street, packing her bag, and fighting with me. Once we wrapped shooting for the day, Male edited everything we had so far according to the storyboard and had a rough visual of what the video would look like. This is when we knew we were a great team and had begun creating something we could be proud to show the class.
While filming on Sunday brought issues such as a lack of extras and timing conflicts, we managed to meet up at Weston Town Center and film everything associated with the storytelling portion of our video and drive over to Male's house once again to film the promotional part of our video. Once this was completed, we would be done filming and all that was left was editing and the presentation. Male got the editing done by Monday and we finally had that side of the project completed.
The last thing to do was to work on the presentation. I made the decision to use Canva for this as, in my experience, it makes the highest quality presentations and we wanted to put our best foot forward in this project. We took our research and every detail we had about our artist and put it all into slides. The most difficult part of creating the presentation was creating the samples. I was in charge of the website and it took me a few hours to get it just the way I wanted, but in the end, I was happy with my final product.
We began the presentation with a background on the rock genre. This brought our research and case studies into the presentation as that was the main factor that went into choosing the marketing techniques we did. Next, we talked about our artist and gave a basic introduction to her and what she does. We introduced our artist, Violet Hart, an afro-Hispanic-American teenager who releases rock music to inspire her audience to follow their dreams and not let anything stop them.
We followed this up with a slide we called the "3 Steps to Become Famous", giving an overview of our marketing strategy and our plan to build a successful brand from the ground up. This led to the slide where we talked about our target audience, as they are the other main reason why we chose the marketing steps we did. Our artist's target audience is males and females between the ages of 14 and 25, with a middle and high-class socioeconomic status.
We then detailed the social media platforms we would be using to promote Violet and that she would be most active on, including samples of posts to capture the overall theme of our brand. These samples helped create a clear picture of our overall brand image, where Violet tries to stay close and connected to her fans at all times.
Violet's website is also a main way in which she keeps her audience up to date. Tour dates, links to her storefront, merchandise, CDs, and music videos are all featured on the website.
Ultimately, this project was very successful because of my group's diligence and hard work. While there were bumps in the road to creating our final pieces, we got there in the end with good communication and dedication. One thing I learned from this project is to have a good schedule when working on such a large project and to have great communication. Communicating with each other allowed us to meet after school and coordinate everything we needed to get done and when it had to be done in an efficient way. If there was anything I take away from this project that I would use in future projects, it would be to always plan out in detail what it is you plan to do and break large endeavors up into smaller, more manageable chunks. This helps me with grasping the scale of a project and complete it within a set time frame. Overall, this project really helped me with communication and working on large-scale projects.
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