reflection

I’ve definitely learned a lot in the process of making my portfolio project. Working on it by myself for the first time was something I was quite nervous to do but in the end I’m very happy that I did. I chose to do the music video promotion for my project. I needed to create a website, digipak, and of course the music video.

For my artist I was initially going to use another friend of mine but he had bailed at the last minute. Thankfully, Koree said he would let me use him as my artist which was really nice of him since we had just met and weren’t friends at the time. Koree is a rap artist who goes by the name “Rawbabyk”. He already has his music on apple music and youtube. I chose to promote his new album Heartbreaker. I went through all of the songs from that album and I liked his song M.I.A. the best and he wanted to do a music video to that song as well. I knew that I wanted the music video to be more about that rapper lifestyle with their cars and possessions since that’s how Koree was already portraying himself as. I really wanted this music video to represent the brand he has for himself already since he’s more established with his music.

The next week we decided to go film at his house. I had the idea to film with two cameras instead of one so I can get two angles throughout the music video. One camera was going to be on my ronin (camera stabilizer) and the other one would be hand held and could get more close ups. My friend and I went to Koree’s house and filmed in a few locations around his house such as the pool and basketball court. It was a lot of fun and he had his friends there to be in the background of the music video. While we were filming I also got some pictures of him and his friends. After that was over I knew I wanted to film at Wynwood for my second location so I could get some more shots of him and the city. Unfortunately at this point, schools started to close down because of the corona virus. The corona virus heavily impacted everyone's project. However, we were still going to get this video done. I went through all of my footage and I did have a lot, so I was very fortunate to be able to just go and edit with the footage I already had.

Editing is my favorite part of creating content. When I grow up I would really like to specialize in editing. Editing is something I already have a lot of experience in. The software I use to edit my music video is called After Effects. I’ve been using After Effects for years so I’m already very comfortable with the software. I was editing in the span of two weeks. I would work on it for a few days one week and then work on it more the next week. Editing the music video was definitely a long process for me since I tend to be very critical of what I make and I just always want it to look perfect. I also had two angles of every scene and I had about four or five different locations around his house filmed, so syncing the videos with the song was kind of annoying. I really like to incorporate cool effects to get the viewers attention. My timeline on my software was super messy. I had over 200 layers. After I finished editing the music video I could now focus on my website and digipak.

I did have photos I could choose from since I took some pictures during the day of shooting. For my digipak I edited the photos on after effects and used the site canva to put all my photos together. When creating my digipak I wanted it to be more red themed since his album name is called “Heart Breaker” and I associate that word with the color red. I was able to use photoshop to change his neon green clothing to red. For the font of the text on the digipak I used a really bolded font. I could not find the font he originally had for the cover of his album so I went with the bold font. I had to edit the digipak several times. I moved around some photos and changed the placement of texts a few times before I finally got the look I wanted.

To create the website I used Wix. I wasn’t the most familiar with making a website but Wix was very easy to use. For his website I included a home page which contains his song, music video, contact, and an ‘about rawbabyk’ section. I then added three more pages which included the merchandise, showtimes, and a behind the scenes from filming the music video. For the merchandise I had originally wanted to use the shirts he had already created for his album but since the font that was on that shirt didn’t match the font I used on my digipak, I had to create my own shirts with the bolded font I had been using to keep the brand consistent. For the show times I just added in cities from Florida since that’s where he lives. Lastly, for the behind the scenes I added photos I took from the day I filmed.


Overall I am very happy with how everything turned out. I really tried my best and Koree also loves how the music video turned out. This project really helped me get out of my comfort zone.