A reflection upon my Young Minds pitch collaboration
I am writing this essay to reflect on my group presentation and TikTok pitch to the Young Minds charity. In this assignment I will be discussing the process of creating our own production company, how I felt the project went, and the finished product/feedback. The objective of our project was to create a marketing strategy for the UK’s leading charity “Young Minds” a company that specialises in children’s mental health and wellbeing. We had clear guidelines to implement the three aims of their “You Matter Strategy” which are “powerful voices”, “never alone” and “someone to turn to” within the design of our production company and produce music that could represent their cause and be the face and voice of change.
The past 10 weeks have been intense, but I feel I have grown a lot and started to develop my creativity, team-building skills, and self-confidence. This journey has helped to ignite a flame within me, I thought had burnt out a long time ago. Having said that, I have always known university would be challenging but I had no idea how much my strength, endurance, and mental wellbeing would have been tested. One of the challenges I faced during my group collaboration was not having much knowledge of music production. My basic skills made me feel overwhelmed and out of my depth. However, this was soon resolved with my team members' support. They showed me compassion and helped me build on the skills I lacked. Gradually I started to feel more confident after hours of working with logic in my team and with the research I did to help up level myself. (LogicProX Vid 2, 2019)
Jade Shambook, Sylvana Ahmed, and Rhyanna Renee Gasper were the three other members of our production company. Coming up with our group name was easy because we were all so different and we wanted to celebrate that. We settled on ‘Variation productions’, the word Variation came to mind when we thought about different shapes, colours, and us as individuals today and when we were all younger. With our demographic being children, we wanted our slogan to be easy to understand, inclusive and effective so we came up with ‘feel in colour’. Because some emotions can be hard to understand but if we present them as colours, you can visually start to connect ‘colours’ moods with feelings. The designing of our logo and slogan was something we developed week by week. Starting as a colorful sketched drawing with paisley lettering and becoming transformed digitally onto our Branded merchandise (T-Shirts). “Standing out in the new music industries requires novel creative development in both artistic and business endeavours.” (D. Hughes, et al 2016, P42)
When it comes to creating our company, it was imperative that all our content was child-friendly, relatable, and had children themselves presenting us. “We believed our experiment to be reliable because we implemented consistent criteria from wording to question structure to measure each variable replicated from secondary research.” (G. Derosier, et al, 2019, P8) We wanted them to help us come up with movements and actions to encourage togetherness and equality. For the production of our two songs, we decided to create two different genres of music, one having afrobeat influences for the pre-teens and the other an R&b /garage track for the teenagers. We put a lot of work into our music, we focused and took our time planning the production, structures, melodies, and lyrics of our songs. Recording our vocals together and the arrangement of all three of our voices was something we prided the foundation of our project on.
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I enjoyed the dynamics of working in a small group it was manageable in comparison to our other collaboration group of 7. If we had more members things would not have run as smoothly. In terms of communication, we were actively in contact with one and other via WhatsApp, group meet-ups, and video calls. The best part of working with my group members was being around talented individuals that I was constantly learning from. However, being cramped in a studio together proved to be challenging at times. Sometimes there would be clashes of characters but thankfully we were always respectful to each other and were able to resolve these differences calmly and eventually come to a compromise. I believe a successful team collaboration is considering others' feelings and views, being open-minded, reliable, goal orientated and have strong communication skills.
When it came to week 4, I started to slow down and feel the pressure of everything. For the next 3 weeks I distanced myself from the group, I was available to discuss things but needed some time out to deal with some personal issues. When I came back into the group dynamic, I did notice that some things had been changed in my absence, and rightly so, they did need to push forward with our plans but I could not help but feel out of sync within things. Lyrics and melodies had been re-written and with the loss of Jade our former member who was taking on the role of admin, company research, and the presentation. I then realized I needed to take the lead in those areas. I decided to do some research to help to re-inspire myself I then came across the Reggae Reggae pitch. and seeing how Levi roots pitched his ideas to the panel, inspired me to be ambitious and creative when it comes down to our pitch. (L. Roots,2007)
We had finally reached the 10-week mark and it was time to present all our work to the charity representative of Young Minds and receive feedback from our lecturer. Our presentation was okay and we had great feedback but there was a lot of room for improvement. We missed the 'You matter strategy' in our presentation as well as the hashtag requirements and some of the information was not in sync with the slides on our PowerPoint. Although we had a few issues. We were all happy with the quality of the work presented. Nevertheless, I still cannot help but feel, that we focused mainly on the music element so the cracks did start to show in the rest of our foundation. This exposed us to critique and allowed us to fall short during our questioning. My main takeaway from this project is that the whole package is the product, not just the designing and ascetics we see in plain sight, time management is crucial and good things can be achieved if you work hard.
Reference list:
BEST PITCHES: Levi Roots' Reggae Reggae pitch lures Peter Jones! | Dragons' Den – BBC Aired: February 2007
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odx8NV6dX0Q
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http://www.kennedy-chester.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Kanye-Final-Paper.pdf
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https://youtu.be/jc63rI424Lc workspace / library / MIDI recording & editing / tools / snap / help menu
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