Reflection - Monday April 26, 2010

Today we continued to research into the new unit of Music Videos. We organized ourselves into groups of four and my group consists of Harry Salnikow, Zoe Horlacher and Sophia Nagar. I think I will work well with this group this term as we all usually find it quite easy to agree on things out of class, and hopefully this will continue within class. We found out that we will be creating a music video on one of the themes from the previous unit:

• education
• environment
• food
• music
• entertainment
• politics
• fashion
• built environment
• colonization
• race relationships

When we looked at these ideas, we immediately crossed off colonization because we felt that this would be quite difficult to incorporate into a music video, and we all agreed we would rather do something more creative like fashion. Despite this narrowing down of the list, we were still finding it challenging to agree on a topic so we decided to use the time efficiently and split off onto 4 different computers and each of us were to research into two of the themes on the list.  I got assigned to research into fashion and the environment.

I found it surprisingly difficult to find songs that were appropriate to make a music video that were about fashion or the environment. I wasn't sure if I should look for a song where the lyrics all talk about fashion, or if I should choose a song with a rhythm and beat that evokes excitement and the mood of fashion. So I looked in online forums for some people's suggestions on fashion related songs and came up with many songs that were all either called fashion, or the lyrics were all fashion. They were appropriate but I felt they were very direct, and would not allow for an interesting abstract film that would evoke the atmosphere of fashion, rather than spelling it out. To try and help myself, I looked at the rubric for this unit, and saw that it was looking for things like lighting and camera techniques and editing so I then decided to stop thinking about the lyrics, but rather songs that allowed for an interesting use of these tools. I feel that an upbeat song would allow this, so now I am going to focus more on upbeat songs for fashion.

I did not have much time to research into environment as well, but now that I have an idea on how to research appropriate songs and what i should be looking for, it will not take me as long. Today I feel that I was the IB Learner Profile "inquirer" because I was still being introduced into a new unit and new area of film. I am still quite unfamiliar with music videos and how they work so completing this work has aroused my curiosity and encouraged me to investigate into the different aspects of music videos, while enjoying myself.