Part 1 Criterion A
1. Explain and justify the need
- What is the problem/task that you have been given? What is the significance (point/purpose) of this task?
- This task is about creating a short copyright free music video. When someone creates an original work, they get a legal rights called copyright to control the use of their work and prevent people from using their work without their permission. When talking about an original work, it includes any type of work such as music, art, essay, research, and so on. One of the famous copyright infringement in music happened around 1960’s. The melody of The 1963 hit single (“Surfin’ USA”) by Beach Boy (Brian Wilson as the composer of the track) was a complete copy of Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen”. When Chuck Berry accused Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' manager, Wilson's father Murray, gave Berry the copyright to the tune. He didn't tell the members of the band, however, who supposedly only learned 25 years later that they weren't getting royalties from this song and that Berry now receives credit for writing it. I think it is copyright infringement because before the Beach Boy was accused, they didn’t give any credit to the original creator Chuck Berry and took his music to create theirs to make profit. However not every original works are copyrighted. There is something called fair use. It allows anyone to use copyrighted works without the owner’s permission but in limited work. They are allowed to remix, parody, or criticize it based on different type of licenses. The licenses give everyone (individual creators to large companies and institutions) a simple way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. There are six types of license and each of them have different usage such as Some of them allows the users to use the work commercially but some don’t. Creative Commons is "a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools" such as the licenses. Copyright, fair use, and Creative commons are important in this text because when creating a short music video using pictures, videos, and music (audio) that are made by others, I have to be careful about copyright and make sure that I am allowed to use them. So during this task, I should use youtube audio library which has a list of free music and sound effects that I can get to use in my videos and use Creative Commons to download free images.
- What do you want to learn to develop a solution to the problem?
- I will be looking at youtube tutorials to learn more about how to use iMovie and youtube video editor since I haven’t had much experience with both of them. I’ve only used main tools in Imovie before so by looking at tutorials, I want to go over simple tools and more advanced tools when I am sure that I will be using iMovie for my music video. And when I am looking for tutorial videos, I should make sure that I use the videos that are most popular because it means that lots of people have watched it which is likely to be easy and helpful. With youtube video editor, I have only used it once but because it was really easy to download the video and has all the simple tools that I need, I might not have to look at any specific tutorial but I might want to just go over all the tools briefly.
- What are music videos that inspire you to create?
4. Summarize the analysis of the research
- Sources that you used to find out more information about movie making/remixing, etc.
Part 2 Criterion B
1. Develop a design specification
1) Follows fair use and creative commons
The video should be legal and follow the fair use law. The whole idea of this project is to make a video that honors the author. This means that the video can include other people's original work that are allowed to be used freely (remixing, cover) but it has to be cited. To make sure that the sources (music, picture, video) are allowed to be taken, the use of Creative Commons and Youtube audio library would be effective.
2) Engaging
The video should be amusing, interesting, and new to engage the audience. I believe that from my experience, videos that are too long and not original or new, tends to be more boring and less engaging for the audience. People always looks for new and innovative ideas so I will try to make a video that seems to have about 3 minutes length and have more then just a video with a song and a picture of the album.
3) Good quality media/visuals
I believe good quality visuals is one of the factors that engage the audience to watch a video until the end. For example, when a picture is blurry and not clear in a video, I think that it is made in a rush, with no care, by a young or unexperienced person and I will think that there is no point of watching the video when there are thousands of videos with better quality of visuals. It might be hard to find visuals (pictures, clips) that has the best quality since I am following free use law and the medias that can be used freely tends to have worse quality but I will try to find the best quality visuals as possible and engage the audience to watch my video until the end.
4) Good quality audio/consistent volume
The video should have clear audio and consistent volume. Usually most of the videos have some type of audio and when there is no audio I believe it makes it less interesting and clear about what is going on. And when the audio is not clear, people thinks the same as bad visual so they think that the video is made by an unexperienced person and make it seems low quality. Also, having a consistent volume is important because if the sound suddenly gets louder, people who are watching might be surprised or if the sound diminishes and can't here anything, they might get frustrated and stop watching the video. So when making the video, I should check the audio is clear and has consistent volume until the end.
5) Has a purpose/theme/meaning
If the video had no purpose, theme or meaning that means that video can be really random and have no meaning to it. So by having a message or theme that specifies the video, the audience won't feel like it was waste of time watching the video. To have a purpose, theme, or meaning, I believe that I should make clear about what I want to do with the video.
2. Develop a range of design ideas
3. Present, justify the final chosen design
- Develop a design specification which outlines the success criteria for the design of a solution based on the data collected.
- How do you know your music video will be successful in the end? What must it be able to do?
1) Follows fair use and creative commons
The video should be legal and follow the fair use law. The whole idea of this project is to make a video that honors the author. This means that the video can include other people's original work that are allowed to be used freely (remixing, cover) but it has to be cited. To make sure that the sources (music, picture, video) are allowed to be taken, the use of Creative Commons and Youtube audio library would be effective.
2) Engaging
The video should be amusing, interesting, and new to engage the audience. I believe that from my experience, videos that are too long and not original or new, tends to be more boring and less engaging for the audience. People always looks for new and innovative ideas so I will try to make a video that seems to have about 3 minutes length and have more then just a video with a song and a picture of the album.
3) Good quality media/visuals
I believe good quality visuals is one of the factors that engage the audience to watch a video until the end. For example, when a picture is blurry and not clear in a video, I think that it is made in a rush, with no care, by a young or unexperienced person and I will think that there is no point of watching the video when there are thousands of videos with better quality of visuals. It might be hard to find visuals (pictures, clips) that has the best quality since I am following free use law and the medias that can be used freely tends to have worse quality but I will try to find the best quality visuals as possible and engage the audience to watch my video until the end.
4) Good quality audio/consistent volume
The video should have clear audio and consistent volume. Usually most of the videos have some type of audio and when there is no audio I believe it makes it less interesting and clear about what is going on. And when the audio is not clear, people thinks the same as bad visual so they think that the video is made by an unexperienced person and make it seems low quality. Also, having a consistent volume is important because if the sound suddenly gets louder, people who are watching might be surprised or if the sound diminishes and can't here anything, they might get frustrated and stop watching the video. So when making the video, I should check the audio is clear and has consistent volume until the end.
5) Has a purpose/theme/meaning
If the video had no purpose, theme or meaning that means that video can be really random and have no meaning to it. So by having a message or theme that specifies the video, the audience won't feel like it was waste of time watching the video. To have a purpose, theme, or meaning, I believe that I should make clear about what I want to do with the video.
2. Develop a range of design ideas
- Present a range of feasible design ideas, which can be correctly interpreted by others.
- Mash up of Kpop songs (one artist) + Creative Commons pictures that fits the theme
- A song + video of the dance from a different song
- Mash up of 2015~2016 popular songs + Lyrics
3. Present, justify the final chosen design
- What are you going to create and why?
- I chose to do a mash up of 2015~2016 popular songs with the lyrics. I thought that instead of lyrics video, the video of each music video could work too but there might be too much changes on the screen and could make the audience feel dizzy, so I chose to have a lyrics shown on the screen because personally I find lyric videos really helpful especially in a mash-up because there are songs that I can't understand what the singer is saying and I always have to look up the lyrics. By showing the lyrics on the screen while it is playing the mash up could help the audience understand what the lyrics are as soon as possible. I was always inspired by mash up songs such as Pop-danthology because it was really interesting how all the different genres of songs could come into one piece and sounds really nice. It is definitely hard for me to make a mash-up like Pop-danthology because it changes the keys and rhythms of songs but hopefully I will be able make a simple mash up songs without using any difficult techniques.
Part 3 Criterion C
1. Construct a logical plan
2. Demonstrate technical skills and follow the plan to make the solution
3. Justify changes made to the design
My initial plan was to make a lyrics video of mashup of most popular songs in 2012~2016. However, I figured that it is difficult to follow the plan. I felt like there is no clear division between ‘popular’ songs and ‘unpopular’ songs. I could’ve use the songs on billboard chart but the billboard chart only had recent songs, mainly made in 2015 and 2016. Also, the final video is a minute or less than a minute, so because the topic ‘most popular songs in 2012~2016’ is too broad and there are thousands of songs made in 2012~2016, I felt like it is better to change my plan a little bit and do a mashup of few (two or three) of my favorite songs sung by the same singer(s). Later, I decided to make a lyrics video and a mashup of MKTO’s songs; “Bad Girls” and “Classic” because the songs didn’t particularly sound similar but I thought that the songs will go well together.
In my plan, I decided to use iMovie and I never thought of using other apps such as Audacity because I felt like it would be easier if I made both of my video and audio in the same place. Also, I wanted to follow rest of my plan because I didn’t want to make too much changes in my plan, so I followed rest of my plan when making the video. However, when making the mashup in iMovie, I figured that it is hard for me to control it and I wasn’t really used to editing audio in iMovie so there are little parts in audio where it doesn’t switch to the other song smoothly. Later when I finished making the mashup, I tried using audacity and it was much easier because I’ve used it before to make something similar to mashup in music class. The only tools that I needed were cutting and moving , so it wasn’t that Audacity is easier because of tools but since Audacity is for people who wants to make a mashup or edit audio when iMovie is more about both movie and audio, Audacity was easier for me to make a mashup because the songs switched more smoothly and naturally.
Part 4 Criterion D
I received 3 feedbacks from my classmates and teacher which is not particularly a wide variety of people but I think it is enough to know generally what other people think about my video. I used the table above for both other people and me to evaluate my video.
Fair Use
Every one said that my video is following the copyright laws since Youtube didn't block my video and credited the video clip I used to Creative Commons.
Engaging
"It was interesting to see the way you fit the lyrics together between the two songs"
"Your video is engaging because the songs were funky and upbeat"
"As for it being engaging, the music was"
Good Quality Media/Visuals
One person agreed with me about the fact that the picture was good quality but the video was not really. And another person said they can't judge much based on what I have because I don't have many visuals in my video.
Good Quality Audio/Constant Volume
People said my video had constant volume and the audio was clear.
Audio/Visuals have the Same Connect
"The image and video you used were both related to what I was hearing, a mashup of that band's songs"
"Once the screen started showing lyrics, they fit well with the music"
"It was good, but there was one transition that was a little shaky"
"The same lyrics are coming out twice at one point but overall the audio and visual were matching"
Attribution of Sources
Everyone agreed that I listed all of my sources at the end of the video.
I felt like the transition of the songs were quite awkward and not smooth sometimes so I decided to make the mashup again using Audacity instead of iMovie. By using Audacity, I was able to zoom in more and be more precise. Later, I exported the audio as a file and put it into iMovie where it has the lyrics that I made before. I exported the entire thing as a file and uploaded onto Youtube again as a final work.
Fair Use
Every one said that my video is following the copyright laws since Youtube didn't block my video and credited the video clip I used to Creative Commons.
Engaging
"It was interesting to see the way you fit the lyrics together between the two songs"
"Your video is engaging because the songs were funky and upbeat"
"As for it being engaging, the music was"
Good Quality Media/Visuals
One person agreed with me about the fact that the picture was good quality but the video was not really. And another person said they can't judge much based on what I have because I don't have many visuals in my video.
Good Quality Audio/Constant Volume
People said my video had constant volume and the audio was clear.
Audio/Visuals have the Same Connect
"The image and video you used were both related to what I was hearing, a mashup of that band's songs"
"Once the screen started showing lyrics, they fit well with the music"
"It was good, but there was one transition that was a little shaky"
"The same lyrics are coming out twice at one point but overall the audio and visual were matching"
Attribution of Sources
Everyone agreed that I listed all of my sources at the end of the video.
I felt like the transition of the songs were quite awkward and not smooth sometimes so I decided to make the mashup again using Audacity instead of iMovie. By using Audacity, I was able to zoom in more and be more precise. Later, I exported the audio as a file and put it into iMovie where it has the lyrics that I made before. I exported the entire thing as a file and uploaded onto Youtube again as a final work.