Wake Up

Although I took some time away from interviews in the past two weeks, I used my time to experiment with a few of my projects and solidify my top choices for mentors and position myself for second interviews.

One of the personal projects I embarked on served as an advertisement for a song I released on Spotify. In the week leading up to the song’s release on November 23rd, I created two short teasers and posted them on Instagram in hopes it would gain some traction.

For a little background and context, I love to dabble in music production. I have been making my music for a little over a year now. Although I’ve posted a few songs on my personal Instagram account in the past as well as on YouTube, I finally decided that I would be a little more “official” with my music-making and release my music on major streaming platforms. (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal, etc.) I was extremely excited about my first release. Utilizing my research and knowledge of video editing, I did my best to create captivating teasers for Instagram that also aligned with the song.

Because my song “wake up” was a lo-fi instrumental song centered around nostalgic memories of mine and my dreams of traveling to New York and England, I wanted to emphasize these elements in the teasers. In the song, I included ambient sounds from sound bites of New York and England, and I figured it would be fitting to emphasize these sounds with visuals. Lo-fi, or low fidelity music, originates from mistakes left in recordings. Over time, lo-fi music has evolved, and the lo-fi sound is defined more as “chill-hop” or soft instrumental music with a moderate tempo, typically featuring a drum beat and or melodic line.

With the way this genre of music has evolved, I figured that a glitch effect would provide a good opportunity for me to flex my video editing muscles while delivering interesting teasers for my song. Moreover, because the song is about a dream that someone is trying to wake up from, I thought these glitches could also represent memory gaps or jumping in and out of consciousness while dreaming.

After looking up a few tutorials for different glitch effects, I combined the information I gathered and took to DaVinci Resolve. The hurdle I had to overcome in this case was that I had nothing to compliment the song other than my cover art. At this point, I didn’t think I could combine footage that I had recorded myself or that I could record - it could ruin the techno-dream style I sought to achieve. I took the same elements I used for my cover art - a starry night sky, a shooting star, a half-moon, and a New York cityscape to create the video below. I made about 3-5 unique glitch effects, pasted them at different points on my timeline, then went into each effect individually and altered the orientation and added effects on each. For some, I inverted certain elements, and for others, I rotated objects, like the moon, for example, and used a mirror effect to add some variance.

A few days later, I created a second teaser to be released the day before the song would be live on stores as a final advertisement. Combing the previous glitch effects, I used royalty-free footage of Westminster and New York and overlaid it with my original cover art. I made sure the text on a separate layer so I could edit it for each new location I was emphasizing. After some experimentation to see what looked good, I came up with the video below. I’m pretty pleased with the result, and overall it was a fun project! I could get creative and create something engaging only from still images.

As it turns out, these videos must have been somewhat effective in promoting my music, despite the content being less favorable to the Instagram algorithm (Instagram tends to push posts to more accounts when there people or faces in the photo, for example). I managed to rack up over 140 all-time streams in the first two weeks after the release on Spotify alone!

Besides this personal project, I have continued to study light and nature through photography each week. I’m trying to get a grasp of what makes a good photo, how to adjust exposure accordingly, and how to best capture various subjects. Once I secure a mentor (which will hopefully come to pass in the coming weeks), I will have some guidance on this front, but for now, it’s a self-guided, fun, explorative journey for me.

In the upcoming week, I hope to deliver an effective presentation on my progress in the first semester so far, remodel my website and update my portfolio, and begin work on a few other personal projects I'm developing. This week coincidentally served as a wake-up call for me - there are only two weeks left in this semester, and all of my classes have a hefty workload. As much as I want to ease myself into the upcoming break and take my foot off the gas, I’ll have to do just the opposite to keep my head afloat. Hopefully, all the stress I’m feeling now will all feel worth it by the time winter break comes!