CCR essay

Creative critical reflection:

The song “Pink + White” by Frank Ocean is very popular and well known especially to the Gen Z/millennials demographics. It is a mixture of the genres R&B and soul, which Frank Ocean is quite known for in his music. His songs tend to be equally focused between the two genres of R&B and soul. 

For the making of the music video, it was challenging in some ways but also very interesting just seeing how well we’d cooperate with the fact that the song “Pink + White” does not have a music video of its own. Frank Ocean is a very hidden and quiet artist, where he does quite frankly limit his publicity and has not made any new music since 2016. Mackenzie (my partner) and I mainly focused on the themes of age and gender when making our music video. For the theme of age, we explored having our music video based on two teenagers (ages 16 and 17) and their relationship as best friends and one eventually passing. As Frank talked about losing someone close to him in the song “Pink + White”, we based our video on that very fact. By research, we’d learnt that Frank Ocean’s fans are mostly a good mix of ages from Millennials and Gen Z. This way it could help us with the age we’d like to aim our music video to, hence why we had our main characters being young teens just for our audience to feel attracted and similar in a way. Pink + White uses a lot of metaphorical language, which can be interpreted in various ways. However, the song seems to be mainly talking about memorializing a dead loved one or a relationship that is deteriorating. In our music video, we thought about letting Mikayla (our main character) show her emotions and how she copes with the fact that her best friend had passed away and she was reminiscing all the memories by walking by familiar places she had spent time at with Alabastar (our second character). 

We wanted a lot of bright colours and artsy paintings/graffiti to make an appearance in our music video, just because of the vibe and statement the song “Pink + White” gives, we felt as if it would be right to capture a lot of that. As we filmed we did also add last minute ideas into our plans literally on the day of, and this can also represent how Frank Ocean is as an artist who is not really ashamed for the things he does and stands by.

As for the editing stage, I enjoyed editing my music video, especially when I was cutting short bits of some shots to match the timing and beat of the song. The software we used for our editing was DaVinci resolve 18. A challenge I faced when editing my music video was that I did lose my original draft during the process of our media class moving around and the computers did get mixed up, but it ended up being a win for me because even though I had to restart my editing, that draft was going better than the original. Both Mackenzie and I had the power to play around with the colours and filters we had available, which was a lot of options and it was perfect for the theme and look we aimed to have for our music video. I used "Hello" by Adele as a  reference music video on the side which gave me an idea of how I imagined our two characters to be towards each other and their relationship in the video. Through my editing journey, I did have a indecisive thoughts about having a split screen based music video. It took me a while to finally make my mind up, because I did keep going back and forth from having a split screen to not having one.

The way our product represents social groups and issues is how our main character (Mikayla) is reminiscing over her old memories with her best friend who had recently passed away. This can be relatable to young people as an issue, especially our target audience of Gen Z/millennials, with the way they all cope with loss. Young people tend to close up when it comes to losing someone that was very close to them. As our main character walks around places and spots where her and her best friend used to hangout, this shows how she is dealing with her loss. As she walks around, thinking of old core memories, this helps her cope with her loss in a good and healthy way. If you notice closely, you can see how we purposely made Mikayla wear dark clothes in the scenes where she is by herself and in the present, and for the scenes where it was her in the past with her best friend we had them wear bright colours and also edited the filter to look brighter than what it originally was. This also ties in with how the song represents a lot of colour, hence the name "Pink + White". As we portray a lot of colour in our music video to match in well with the meanings and emotion behind the song, that is our aim to creating a branding image for our product.

Time was spent on our digipak covers, drafts and final cover. We based our digipak covers to be similar to our music video with its themes and colours. My partner and I both have extremely different digipak covers but both are similar in how we chose to make use of the colours we had. As I mentioned before, Frank Ocean is a very hidden and secretive artist. He does not appear much in events and gatherings anymore, nor does he post music. Due to this and how he is, he also portrays this through his social media platforms. For the making of our Instagram pages for Frank Ocean, we did not have a real account from him to help us but we did look at other well known R&B artists like Bruno Mars, Beyonce, Daniel Ceaser, etc who helped give us an idea of how we should create our Instagram page to look like. Mackenzie and I aimed to have our social media, digipak covers and music video stand out but also match and confide to the themes and original plans we had for our music video.