TikTok presentation production log (4023)

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Week 1

27.09.21

In my first week of university, I was asked to start a production company and collaborate with other members of our class to produce a TikTok video and a pitch presentation to a charity called Young Minds. The first person I interacted with was Rhyanne, she was a producer/musician who could compose and create the music for our tracks. I mentioned that I was a Singer / Songwriter and had experience working with children. Rhyanne and I then become the first two members of our team and we decided to continue our search and look for a third and fourth member. After speaking to a few other people with similar skills, we finally found our last two members. Jade a strong academic who was passionate about mental health and who liked to write and do research on current events and Sylvana was a creative with an interest and profound knowledge of art, fashion and social media. Once formed we produced our company name 'Variation Productions', our slogan 'Feel in colour' and started to make an Instagram account, a company email, and a WhatsApp group to contact one another to arrange meetings outside of the university. We left each other that day, with an understanding of each of our roles and a clear plan of action for our next encounter together. The first week we formed our group we made a social media platform to share our ideas and create a following, during this week I started to plug our brand name adding a temporary logo just to get our name out there, along with pictures of our team, a description of the work that we and added a few references to children’s mental health to show the main cause we support.

Week 2

04.10.21

Unfortunately, this week we lost a team member, Jade. She realised that she was in the wrong class, and our team of four sadly became a team of three. Saddened by the recent events of Jade’s departure, I turned to Instagram to inform our following of the changes to our team and to give Jade the send-off she deserved. Moving on we decided to create a pop / R&b track for the pre-teens (5-12-year-olds) and to keep the lyrics short and catchy along with a trap/grime track for the teenagers (13-16 years olds). We gave ourselves a bit more creative freedom with this track and wanted the lyrics to be a bit darker and more mature or (cool) and relatable to their age group we also went back and forth with the idea of adding Molatov or Kaze on the bridge/breakdown of our older children's track.

Week 3

11.10.21

This week we started to think about our branding name and logo design. Sylvana started to sketch/draw out a few ideas and started to create prototypes of our company name. We plan to get a graphic designer (Rhyannes brother) to produce the final logo digitally to make our ideas stand out and look professional. I also started to draft the format of our PowerPoint presentation and started adding pictures, orders and information for us to present.

Week 4

18.10.21

The beginning of the week was going well. We started writing more lyrics for the songs Rhyanane had produced with and without the use of her laptop. Seeing as she was having issues with her equipment from time to time. However, towards the end of this week, I started to feel overwhelmed with the workload and tried my best to organise myself but fell short and needed time out to process a few things in my personal life. I decided to take a back seat in terms of getting any more group work done and slowed down physically and mentally, to accommodate my mental well-being.

Week 5

25.10.21

Reading week- On this week I felt rundown and unfortunately caught a virus/flu. I spent the whole week bedridden, resting and recovering. As I wasn’t physically attending university I found it easier to stay home and focus on getting better.

Week 6

01.11.21

Continuing to feel mentally drained but now physically feeling better, I spent the majority of the week online. Although I was in contact with my team and responded to any questions they might have had, I wasn’t doing much work for our project. But thankfully, my team stayed productive and pushed on with the lyric writing, creating melodies and structures for our 2 songs. Rhyannna also arranged the tracks as well as thought of different elements to add to our music to make sure it meets the brief. At this time the track for the teens' genre that been changed from grime to garage and R&b. I agreed with the change and thought it was for the best.

Week 7

08.11.21

This week we focused and put ourselves into gear. Hearing that we needed to present our work in front of the class and have it 80% completed, really motivated us to put our issues and worries of the pressers of the workload to one side and concentrate on the task at hand. This week we stayed late at university together every weekday apart from Thursday which we had off. We also come in to record on Saturday and spent the whole of Sunday at my house, in my makeshift studio recording and planning for our presentation preview on the 15th Nov. During this time we came up with additional lyrics for our songs, melodies, harmonies, ad-libs, backing vocals and recorded the main vocals for our tracks. Once all the music was organised and our ideas were arranged we picked the best parts of both songs to fuse to make the sound of our 60second TikTok. In terms of our content for our TikTok video, we thought of lyrics in our songs that were meaningful and empowering and made up memorable simple actions to demonstrate for our younger helpers. We taught the children the movements, told them to be happy and fun and played them the fusion of our songs so they knew how to move along. We were so happy that we were able to incorporate young children in our video but we wanted to show different age gaps so we decided to collaborate with the dancers at the university to give our video the teen edge and add some style to our product. Once all the footage was filmed Sylvana edited the TikTok, added writing and our logo to the video along with our music. Sylvana also created a TikTok page for our band so our name is displayed throughout our video and to have a link to upload it to if the PowerPoint link failed. Our PowerPoint presentation was more or less ready it just needed a few tweaks and we needed to practice it, time it and run through it together. The process of our music-making, logo design and all-around journey was all shared and documented on our Instagram page.

Week 8

15.11.21

Presenting our pitch to the class was nerve wreaking, we got good feedback but I felt that we could have practised our presentation a few more times and worked on our timing where we went over by quite a bit. The class seemed to like our ideas and we all felt happy with what we had produced so far but we were excited to add our final details.  

Week 9

22.11.21

The week before our presentation, Rhyanna was online for the beginning of the week but we still got quite a bit done and she joined us in person mid-week to sort out some of the finishing touches. We had to make sure we tied a few loose knots and applied some of the feedback we got from our pre-presentation last week. We altered some of our TikTok by adding the finished logo and tidying up some footage. Once the logo was digitally printed we were then able to purchase t-shirts and get our band name digital printed for our merchandise. During this time we also recorded some children’s vocals for the pre-teen songs to add children to our sound.

Week 10

29.11.21

Our presentation day – We enjoyed delivering our pitch and we were excited to show off all of our hard work however we did make a few mistakes and missed the brief due to our nerves and us panicking to get our Tiktok video link uploaded. But we were still happy with all our hard work.