Marketing Project Reflection

     These past few weeks my classmates and I were given the opportunity to work with one of two companies and aid them in their branding and marketing by creating various examples of publicity and branding material.
     My group and I decided to work with Wonder Paws Rescue, a South Florida based pet rescue and foster center. We began our project by researching two different pet rescue organizations - Petco Foundation and ASPCA- to help us decide who our target audience would be and how we would brand the company to appeal to them. We found that social media would be a central point in our campaign since our primary target demographic we decided would be 25-35 year olds, specifically in middle to upper class suburban areas, since they are some of the best applicants for pet rescue as well as one of the largest users of Facebook and Instagram which is where our campaign would primarily live. We found that recognition would be important as well so we decided to stick with a green theme overall in the pieces we created to be easily recognizable in the minds of consumers.
     We decided to focus our campaign on fundraising since the organization is not for profit and they rely heavily on donations to maintain their company. We created many different examples of fundraising tools such as selling shirts and calendars as well as publicity ideas which was our "pet finder," a play on Tinder that would allow users to swipe on different rescues until they were presented with one who's profile and description they liked most. In addition we created examples of social media posts, remodeled their website, and created two examples of short videos that they could upload to their social medias and website. Personally my favorite piece that I created was a brochure which contained detailed description of what donations go towards for this company, it was one of my first tries at creating a print component and I think it went quite well, and in its creation I believe it will aid me in creating the print component for my portfolio project. Overall this experience will have been extremely helpful when I create my portfolio project as it has shown me the importance of branding and recognition through various means and mediums.

Here is my brochure !




and here is my Instagram story example.

Welcome Back :-)

     Hello and welcome back to the rebirth of this blog ! Not too much has changed since my last post, I've started my senior year of high school and transitioned from Media Studies AS level to Media Studies A level, woohoo ! I really enjoyed my experience in AS level it was definitely my favorite course of the year and continues to be, in fact taking AS level made me realize that I want to make a future and career for myself in the media world.
     Starting the new year I felt much more knowledgeable about the media world and like I had a sturdy foundation for the year to come so I was very excited to get my hands on creating new pieces. Last year I felt like I focused mainly on the film aspect of media studies but now I find myself delving further into the print side of media, and with the array of choices we were given for our portfolio project that all have various components involved I believe I will get an extremely well rounded and balanced experience of both film and print. Beyond the portfolio project, the other part of this course's exam will definitely further my peers and my own knowledge and experience not only in different media theories but with learning how to be constructive and critical to our own work as well as the work of others. I am so excited for the year to come and the works I will create.

Creative Critical Reflection

Here it is, my CCR ! My part in Winola is officially over. It's all so bittersweet but I'm glad I had this experience. :)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mVo9wtFuqyvqCNOfSHD1kCjMjjaJPZtN/view?usp=drivesdk

Winola

And here it is, the final copy of Winola !

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A8MjI5XVYm-g0PaJiCbdswchKYzd7kJ5/view

Music Editing

Hello everyone ! Happy final week ! Rachel and I are nearly finished with our film opening,
we only have to add a few final touches, mainly the credits. I mentioned at the end of my
last post that I was “recomposing” our music so, I thought I’d go into my experience in
editing the music, “English Country Garden,” for our film.

I’d like to preface this with the fact that I am not in anyway an expert in editing music.
However, I would like to think that I have enough of a basic understanding of  music to
make it work for what we need.

The Process:

The first thing I did was familiarize myself with the music, I listened to it multiple
times to figure out the different patterns, unfortunately, I was not able to find any sheet
music to our song to better visualize what I was working with. Listening through it multiple
times was gonna have to suffice. My original plan was to take the middle of the music,
duplicate it, and then put the duplicated portion before the stinger at the end. But, upon listening
to the music further I decided that would not be the best option because of how the music
moves emotionally throughout the piece and it didn’t make sense to me to make the audience
listen to this musical journey twice. So I decided to focus on the patterns in the music instead.
I found that there was a tendency in the music to play a phrase and follow it with a phrase that
began very similar to the initial phrase but would then build and rise at the end. What I ended
up doing was selecting those “initial phrases” in the music, duplicating them, and essentially
having the phrase I chose play twice before the “rising and building phrase” played. I did all
of this on the iMovie mobile application on my phone;  by getting a video version of “English
Country Garden,” putting it into iMovie, cutting and duplicated the phrases I needed, and then
saving the video onto my phone and sending it to Rachel so she could separate the audio and
put onto her computer and eventually onto our film opening.

Production: Day 2

Our second day of production was a lot less filming. On Thursday at 5:30
Rachel and I met up and we went through our footage. After our first day of
filming Rachel had already pointed out that we were missing a shot for an
eyeline match so we knew we would have to go out and get that but before we
did we wanted to make sure we didn't need anything else. I made sure to bring
all of our props just in case we did need to reshoot any footage, luckily the only
shot we were missing was that eyeline match of the tree so there was no need
to repeat the hair and makeup process again. We quickly drove to The Ridges
at around 6:40 and got the shot of the tree that we needed.

From there we went back to Rachel’s house and got to work on editing. From the
beginning one of our biggest concerns would be that we wouldn't have enough
footage, because it’s hard to estimate how long each shot will be based on just a
storyboard. Rachel had already chopped up about half of the footage and our
problem ended up being that we had too much footage rather than not enough. So
we spent some time making the shots nice and tight as well as speeding up some
of the shot we felt went by too slow, we couldn’t completely omit many of the shots,
which was our original plan if it came out too long, but the shots all work together
in a sequence to tell the story. We did however, manage to cut our opening down
from 2:48 to 2:08

.

Then came the music, Rachel and I both really liked how the song I found, “English
Country Garden” fit with our opening but it really was too short, so I have spent some
time trying  edit the music, but, basically recomposing the music is not something I am
too well versed in so I’ll be giving it a few more tries and if it doesn’t work we have
already started looking for other options.

Foreal Foreal Filming

First Day of Filming: CHECK ! Yesterday Rachel and I finally began shooting
and it was actually a lot of fun. We started off around 2:30, we went to Office
Depot and AC Moore to buy the last few props we needed which included a
pink pen and a bunch of fake flowers (that just so happened to be on sale !).
From there we went to our local public library and borrowed their last copy of
Moby Dick. We stayed at the library, since it was near our filming location, to do
any last minute props - the to-do list and the fluffy part of the pen- and we also did
all the hair and makeup in the back of the library, I was so worried that we would
get kicked out but we stayed very quiet  and courteous so none of the librarians,
or security, or other library goers seemed to mind to me curling Rachel’s hair.

At around 5:30 we headed towards our filming location, The Ridges, we spent
the next hour or so waiting for golden hour by setting up our garden of fake flowers,
practicing the staging of some of the shots, and making sure our tree was in fact climbable.

By 6:30 golden hour was finally coming around. Knowing we only had about an
hour before the sunset we really began to grind as much as we could, I had brought
copies of the storyboard and the script so we could both follow along. We had to
shoot all the shots in chronological order since we wanted to make sure the lighting
was realistic and the sun didn’t seem lower at the beginning than at the end , it also
helped us stay organized and not forget which shots we had already gotten and which
we had missed.

Everything was shot on my iPhone 7, so once we finished our day of filming
we headed back to Rachel’s house and immediately airdropped all the footage
to her Mac which was super efficient and simple. We looked through the footage
quickly to see which version of the shots would work best, and then I went home.
Rachel then continued to crop the videos and play around with saturation and color
grading. I’d say it was a pretty successful day of filming !