Category: Video Reflection

In the processing of making this cover video, I found that there is much more work than I thought. First, if we want to construct a narrative music video, we have to build a story line and create a basic frame of this video, and connecting footages with the key scenes during editing. Then, I believe the communication between the camera operator and actors is important, since we do not have a director, and that requires the imagination of the camera operator who decides the shooting angles, length of each scenes and the expectation of the performance of actors. After finish shooing footages, editing is an essential step, which is the spirt of the video making process. Those discontinued, meaningless footages would be transformed into a completely different shape in a video.

When I was editing, I learned that storyline must be well-established, and then focused on details. At first, I missed picking footages that should be in the video, which made my partial video nonsense and confused. Then I tried different footages combinations, played them over and over again, and choosing the most appropriate and making-sense ones to put in my video. Because we are doing the music cover video, the switches between sense to sense and music beats have to be matched in some extent, which makes audience more comfortable to watch it. This beat matching cost me lots of time to make adjustments.

Those are the most difficult situations I have encountered when I was editing, but luckily, I resolved these problems eventually, and I had a very great experience with my group of doing this cover video.

 

Shiruo zhang

In the course of creating our cover video, I have learned that it is crucial to embody creativity and a strong vision in order to make it a success. Hence, this consists of a huge production that takes a great effort from different roles of expertise to re-create the music video well. These roles include performers, choreographers, videographers, producers, and editors.

By being the main videographer for the cover video, it made me realize how important it was to get the right shot. In particular, it is significant to have a clear vision of how you are going to capture the performers in a particular scene. Through using specific camera angles, it further helps shape the meaning of the lyrics and the song. There were many particular instances where I had to be creative with camera positions to perform different camera angles to further dramatize the scenes. Therefore, as an individual videographer,  I had to be innovative to adopt different angles in order to imitate Hangover’s scenes.

However, without having a clear vision and creative idea in mind, it is really hard for the group to start the project. There were many instances where we had to use one of our film days to figure out the props, the scenes, and the roles for our cover video. There is no doubt that K-pop stars like G-Dragon, who have the capability of not only performing, but also choreographing, composing, and producing their own songs are truly labelled as a K-pop idol. Overall, I adore and applaud fans who have created cover videos on Youtube because this kind of task surely takes lots of time and energy to assemble.

Emily Chow

After making the cover video of PSY’s “Hangover”, I have a better understanding about K-pop and fandom. Being a K-pop idol is harder than you think, because they have to practice singing and dancing for a long time until actually debut. They will not know when they can debut and they just keep practicing every day since their company will not tell them. Even after they can debut, they still need to keep practicing and show their perfect side in front of their fans.

We usually focus on the idols on stage; however, we should also pay more attention to the people who work so hard behind stage such as producers, songwriters and composers. Making a 3 to 4 minutes long music video is definitely not an easy task, and I can imagine that how much time and efforts they need to put in. Starting from writing songs and lyrics, then need to decided different locations and prepare different materials for filming. The editors need to combine everything at last to produce a final version of music video. Each step is very important and cannot be skipped.

On the other hand, I really admire the fans who do the dance or song cover. I never did any cover videos before and this is my first time. I found that it is really challenging. Before filming, we needed to get a rough idea about the music video. At the time of shooting, we needed to act in front of the camera with different facial expressions or movement. The lighting and shooting angles are also very important. I definitely know more about the process of K-pop covering.

Cherry Cheng

The process by which we created our cover video project provided an experience that I thought allowed us to envision what it would be like to actually create a k-pop music video. At the beginning of this class, I had very little knowledge about k-pop, let alone the huge production behind the music videos that this industry produces. As such, the only few k-pop artists I had been exposed to were those who had made an impact overseas, like Psy.

A big concern of mine before we had even chosen which video we were going to cover was my lack of dancing talent. It was around this time that it became very apparent to me how talented every k-pop performer is; whether that be in singing or in dancing. This lead to our group choosing a less dance-intensive song, which everybody in our group was somewhat familiar with.

In making our video, we analyzed the music video and decided which scenes we could replicate, and others that would be too difficult. In Psy’s Hangover, most of the scenes are not too graphic intensive, and are not reliant on too many props; which we considered to be a good thing. One of the scenes features Psy surrounded by hundreds of soju bombs; while we considered recreating this, we quickly realized that the difficulty of setting it up and getting the perfect take would prove too difficult and time consuming.

Overall, making this cover video brought to light how difficult it actual is to produce a real music video. Working with other group members who had a more consolidated knowledge of k-pop also added to the experience.

Joel Yap

As long as we finished our first cover video, the process of making this video let me realize the most important elements in group work and the power of K-pop. Our cover video for PSY’s song is Hangover. The video for hangover is not just dancing or singing, it is more complicated, it likes a drama. As a result, the process of covering this video is not that easy.

First, our group member’s distribution should be clear. Hangover has lots of different plots; our group members need to distribute each part to each person. Then we will choose which part we want to performance individually. It means we should learn how PSY perform in the video and try to become him. This part made me feel that our group like a K-pop group, each member should have a balance time showed in the video and we need to practice together to make the video better.

Second, our performance should be similar. We need to find some places similar with those scenes in the video. And our video has lots of parts were so details. So for our group, we always spend times on finding an empty classroom, designing a classroom and buying some staffs to contribute our cover video. It reflected on that the K-pop idols are so powerful because if they want to make a perfect video, they need to become multitasking, they should handle both dancing and singing even become an actor.

Making a cover video is not easy. I feel so hard when we attempted to perform and I am so admiring those K-pop idols that they can bring such perfect video to us. The process of the cover video let me gained a new understanding of group work and how the K-pop idols do the hard work.

Ziye Pan