Creative Critical Reflection
How do your products represent social groups or issues?
‘Still With You’ is a music video highlighting love and longing, and how they are both one and the same, more often than not. With such themes, it is at its core an effort to highlight the romantic lyrics of the song ‘Still With You’ and does not inherently represent any social groups, but there is a social issue that runs through the entire narrative of the song and music video and is specifically represented in it: the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Still With You’ is a song released by music group BTS’ member Jungkook on June 4th, 2020 at the height of the pandemic and consequent lockdown worldwide. The song’s lyrics (self-written by the singer himself) therefore express his feelings of distress and detachment from the world felt universally by everyone during the challenging time that was the lockdown. The lyrics also poeticize the singer’s desire to see his fans again and his resolution to ‘run towards’ them as soon as the situation allows him to.
These feelings of longing to see your loved ones again and desire to be out in the world were truly universally felt by everyone during the pandemic, and so when making the music video for this song, I decided to make sure that the core concept of the video was in line with this (since relatability is an important factor to be considered when making any sort of media that one wishes is desirable to the general public).
In my music video for ‘Still With You’, the narrative I’ve constructed is as such: the unnamed main character has been separated from his beloved due to Covid (and although it is never specified in the music video, there is a finality to the main character’s grief that makes it easy to assume that his beloved has passed away- gone somewhere he can never follow).
Due to this separation, the main character is seen grieving his lost love and visiting the places he went to with her as he reminisces about when they were together. Throughout this, an obvious visual indication of the pandemic is that the main character wears a face mask in the parts of the video shot in the ‘present’ and no masks are seen in the ‘flashback’ portions of the video.
I also made sure to shoot the ‘present’ scenes so that no other people could be seen in the shot except for the main character, both to highlight his loneliness, and the pandemic.
How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
My music video ‘Still With You’ was originally constructed with the intention of having two very specific colour palettes that would be used throughout it and help contrast the two time periods shown in the music video. These colour palettes were initially supposed to be cool blues and greens for the present-day shots and warm yellows and oranges for the flashback scenes.
Ultimately, the way we shot the video, this strong contrast between both types of shots was hard to maintain, and so the VCR effect was instead used to easily differentiate between both, but even then, we ended up with three main colours from all the shots in the music video.
When I initially began working on the title card of the music video and then the instagram page and digipak, I wanted to make sure to pick colours directly from the video to make sure that all the different aspects related to this ‘Still With You’ project worked together well and created a sense of branding.
In order to do this, I went through the finalised music video and picked out my favourite shots by screenshotting them. Following are the key ones I decided to use:
It was from these, and my original title card (also inserted below) that I picked out my main colours and pictures to be used in the branding of the project.
Apart from the colour scheme, one element of my production that is very important in creating a sense of homogeneity and branding for the project is the loopy, cursive font used throughout. I used this particular font because being handwritten meant it had imperfections, and yet the care that seemed to be put into writing each letter reminded me of a carefully-written love letter, which felt perfect for this project.
Yet another element of the project that creates a sense of ‘branding’ is the stylised lowercase used across the board in the project. From the blog and instagram page titles to the title card and lyric translations embedded into the music video, lowercase letters are used throughout and really add to the overall vibe and branding of the project.
Furthermore, every aspect of the ‘Still With You’ project is marked with a sense of romance and sentimentality that comes together and really solidifies into a sense of ‘branding’ for it. Overall, whether it be the music video itself, the blog, the instagram page, or the digipak, the sense of branding across all aspects of the production is strong and uniform.
How do your products engage with the audience?
Each and every aspect of ‘Still With You’ as a project is built to engage with the audience, from the relatable and empathy-inducing storyline of the music video to the instagram page that directly engages with the audience.
The storyline of ‘Still With You’, as previously-stated, symbolises longing and love with the backdrop of the pandemic. All of these relatable themes combined with the point-of-view shots in the flashbacks which directly engage the audience by making them feel like they’re part of the narrative and the English translations of the Korean lyrics being shown on screen to help the audience understand, relate to, and engage with the song and music video better all help engage the audience of ‘Still With You’.
The ‘Making Still With You’ instagram page in particular was built so that it engages with the audience in a multitude of ways. From the posts being written in a friendly tone, full of rhetorical questions, emojis, and prompts (such as ‘let us know in the comments!’), to the posts themselves being logo reveals and countdown posts, each revealing a little bit more about the project as the d-day of its release draws near, the instagram page constantly allows the audience to become engaged with the project whether directly (by asking the audience to let us know their thoughts) or indirectly (by counting down and therefore creating a sense of excitement for what is to come).
Another way that the instagram page engages with the audience is by posting links to the music video and reminding the audience to give it a watch- something very important in today’s streaming-dominated industry where online metrics such as views, likes, and streams determine the success of a project (whether the project in question is a film, music video, or just a song).
This instagram marketing campaign of sorts for the ‘Still With You’ music video was made and executed after studying and observing various examples of how music is marketed these days in the industry. The way that I structured the campaign on instagram, making use of the site layout to post pictures that interact as a grid and part of a whole, is a very commonly-used marketing tactic in the industry nowadays since it both looks aesthetically pleasing and allows companies to build hype for the upcoming project by posting countdowns, logo reveals, actor reveals, and even lyric and music video teasers.
These are the various ways in which the products of the ‘Still With You’ project engage with their audience.
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
As mentioned previously, a lot of research and observation of the industry has gone into structuring not only the marketing campaign, but every aspect of the ‘Still With You’ project. As mentioned in blog posts for the project, the digipak for ‘Still With You’ required some research so that I could figure out what exactly a digipak is meant to look like and the purpose it serves along with the conventions of digipak designs and then make my own accordingly.
For the music video itself as well, a lot of research informed my overall style of directing, filming, and editing the video. I drew inspiration from a lot of my favourite existing music videos as well. There’s an editing quirk in the music video at 3:38, for example, where it’s a point-of-view shot (i.e. the main character filming his lover) in which the girl asks the main character to stop filming, covering the camera with her hands, and the video actually cuts out by going black for a second. This was inspired from the ‘G.C.F in Tokyo’ video shot and edited by Jungkook of BTS where I first saw this little editing quirk.
As for conventions, ‘Still With You’ adheres to a lot of music video conventions to create an introspective and romantic atmosphere. An example of this is the fact that there are lipsync shots in the music video, that flashbacks have been marked with point-of-view shots and an old VCR filter that includes a grain effect for an old film-like effect, and that a big chunk of the video has been shot using a projector to create an interesting visual effect. All of these are characteristics and conventions of music videos and examples of them can be found in many popular ones.
Rather than challenge conventions, I’ve deliberately chosen to adhere to them for this project since the natural contrast of the flashback and present-day shots in addition to the lipsync ones make for a video that is interesting and engaging enough that it need not challenge any conventions to stand out for the audience.
This is how my research has informed my products for ‘Still With You’ and how they all adhere to the specific conventions of their genre or product type.Â
Overall, ‘Still With You’ has been an incredibly important project to me on a personal level and something I am so ultimately proud of. And of course, since I could not possibly have done it alone, I’m also very grateful to all my friends who helped me film it and Dania, my teammate, for helping me dream up the concept for it in the first place.
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