Crush Culture

Song Choice and Pre-Production

My team chose to recreate the video for Crush Culture by Conan Gray. The themes portrayed in the video were less along the lines of being a teen who wants to fall in love and be swept off their feet and more like romance kind of sucks and I'm tired of being forced to look at it all around me. I really enjoyed that theme and so being able to recreate that was cool and definitely something I was looking forward to. My role throughout the filming process was director which was stressful but in a good way. I liked being able to kind of say how I wanted things to look and being able to rely on my teammates to do that successfully even though we didn't get enough footage by the due date. 

Our process for pre-production was pretty simple. Savannah and I went through the video and figured out what parts were needed for the storytelling aspect and how we could keep the video within our time limit. After that we broke the video up into 30-45 second chunks that all four of us would be responsible to do the pre-production work for to save time. Then came casting which seemed really simple and just altogether easy to take care of at first but, after casting we started to realize how important scheduling is to take into account when casting anyone but especially the lead in your video. 

What Was Learned

Personally I think I learned a lot about just how much goes into a video that is made with the purpose of being entertaining. My original thought was that it would be easier than a piece created to inform but I was painfully wrong about that. The sheer amount of work I had to put in not only during filming but before and after was much more than what we needed to do first semester but for me it was more exciting. I got to work more with cameras that I'm more used to which was great even though I didn't do the filming for this video.

I got to get a short experience with directing something more on the artistic side of video which not only was a lot of fun it was interesting to see how different it felt when compared to a feature piece. I learned more about how to communicate my vision for a piece with other people. In doing that I figured out that I talk a lot with my hands when trying to explain things to other people. Whether or not that truly helps with anything I don't know. 

What I Would Do if I Were to Do it Again

Some things that I would do the same include the way my group broke up pre-production work. I think that getting that out of the way quickly and efficiently had a positive impact on the work that would need to be done when both filming and editing. I also think that the way my group worked was pretty good since the few shots we had were good ones that had nice clarity and balance. 

If there's one thing that I would do differently it's casting even though Mario is a god actor and was a great fit for the lead in the video. When casting we didn't really take into account everyone having busy schedules. That fact really ended up hurting us in the end along with the constant school days getting cancelled.

Final Thoughts

All in all I really enjoyed doing this project even though I got super stressed out about a lot of things during it. I enjoyed going through the motions of it being my first time making something like this and I have a newfound appreciation for anyone that is really good at filming music videos. I also think that this is definitely something that I would like to do again but with my own concept and interpretation of a song.