Prior to thinking about the written element of this assignment, we did some exercises in our seminars to help start us off. We had to come up with a one-line manifesto for ourselves, and after much consideration, I went with YOLO (you only live once): I like living by this motto to encourage myself to grasp any opportunity that comes my way – I think regretting not doing something is worse than regretting doing something, because then you’ll never know the outcome. Thinking of that as a one-liner sum-up of my values, I started thinking about what to write about for this component of our assignment.

Usually, I only really write screenplays – I find it a lot less awkward to structure than a short story. But, in the brief, it outlined that it needed to be either a short story, scripted dialogue, a poem, or song lyrics… I wasn’t sure if a screenplay counted as one of these, but I also thought that it’d be good to challenge myself as part of this course, so I decided to go with a short story.

At first, I just tried to start writing something and see how it went, but I kept getting stuck: I found it hard to balance between being too surface-level and impersonal and being way too personal. It was also hard to turn a story about me and my life into a narrative that was engaging.

After a lot of trial and error and writing about five different things, I ended up going for a more self-reflective journal-entry-style short story. I was initially worried that this sort of writing wouldn’t really match the brief, but after double-checking the guideline document, there was a lot of emphasis put onto “explore who you are” and “what’s your voice” – and I felt that this was by far the best way for me to convey that. If I had more time, I would’ve really liked to do a little screenplay, but I wasn’t getting any good ideas or inspiration, so I’ll leave that for element two…

It’s quite hard to pinpoint any specific inspirations for this story because the sentiments and ideologies are all very deep-set and ingrained into my personality – I can’t exactly pick out where or when I started having these thoughts or living with this kind of attitude. That being said, there is one show that really helped me realise my values: it’s called Summer Strike (2022), and it essentially follows a woman in her mid-twentys who is experiencing burnout and hates her job – like the title suggests, she goes on a ‘summer strike’ where she quits her job and moves from the capital city to a small seaside town. There, living on only a backpack of material goods, in a shabby abandoned building, she relearns the value of a peaceful life and close-knit sense of a community. The program ends with a statement that left a very large impact on me: “my life right now is truly sufficient”. Ever since watching that program, I think I found it a lot easier to just say, “things may not be the most exciting or perfect right now, but they’re certainly good enough”.

Other inspirations include songs such as ‘Best Day of My Life’ by Tom Odell, ‘She Will Be Loved’ by Maroon 5, and ‘Enough’ by ATEEZ – all of which capture and reflect the optimistic attitude that I try to live my life while upholding.

The third part of the element 1 assignment that I worked on was the moodboard. In the lecutre, we were taught about the importance of colour, typography, and direction, in conveying a brand’s image to its target audience. In the seminars, we thought more about oursevles as a brand, and how to convey our personality and beliefs through the same techniques.

Firstly, I needed to solidify my key values – what messages did I want my productions to convey to its audience? I thought back to the ‘manifesto’ that I came up for myself during our first seminar: YOLO (you only live once). I like living by this motto because it encourages me to grasp opportunities that come my way, and always be true to myself, because I don’t want to regret not having done certain things: even if I regret doing something, at least it’ll become a life lesson – if you don’t do something that feel compelled to do, you’ll never know the outcome. Still, it’s a fine balance to be both selfish (doing everything I want) and considerate (being thoughtful of how it might impact others before I do something). I also do believe in past lives, but that’s besides the point…

I soon decided that my key values would be: familiarity, friendliness, approachability, and warmth. I want all of my productions to be an honest depiction of my personality, my interests, my desires, my morals, and my hopes – and I’d also like for these to inspire viewers to be true to themselves in the same way throughout their creative practices.

Although we had the ability to research online and pick photos for our moodboard, I decided to use things entirely from my camera roll: this is mainly because, although a lot of the images on my phone are just downloaded from the internet anyway, I felt as though doing this would allow more of my personality to shine through. While scrolling up and up through hundreds of images and videos, I found a lot of recurring themes: a lot of optimistic quotes, a lot of 0.5x photos of my outfits, a lot of food pictures, a lot of concert pictures, and a lot of little moments with my friends. Because these are pretty integral parts of my personality, I thought it’d be best to centre my moodboard around these – my goal was to create a wholistic image of me as a person, rather than to portray a particular aesthetic.

When discussing with my seminar leader, I was also guided to a one-liner that describes me as a brand: ‘social media fan influencer’ – I post a lot of what I do online, whether it be a new restaurant I’ve tried or the most recent concert I’ve gone to, and I get a good amount of replies and reactions from people. The words that can be used to describe my approach to social media are friendly, relateable, real, and open: I’m very transparent about what I like and dislike, and I try to be very honest in what I post – no editing, and not showing only the good/glamorous. I’ve had to think quite hard about how to portray that in a very obvious way through my moodboard.

For my colour scheme, I wanted to choose colours that fit my idea of pretty while also reflecting the colours that personally appear in my day-to-day life. I decided to colour pick the main colours from the 15-30 images that I chose beforehand, and then add them to a pallette. After arranging the images on my final moodboard, I would choose from this pallette for the annotations and doodles.

When thinking about what style my moodboard could take, I was struck with inspiration from an album photobook that I looked through recently: THE NEW SIX’s 2nd EP Love Never Dies had a concept that I really liked from the music videos, but when my friend and I flipped through one of the album’s photobooks, I was impressed by the originality of the concept. They mixed grainy, retro-esque profile shots with overlays of iconic features of today’s modern technology, such as AirDrops or iMessages: I think this juxtaposition made for a really effective reflection of the passage of time – love never dies; from the ages of grainy film photos, to our current era of wireless photo sharing, our love continues. These visuals also fit very well with my own aesthetic, as I am a victim of the Apple ecosystem, and I also like the clean look of the font. Thus, for fonts, I decided to use San Fransisco Pro (Apple’s go-to font).

For the third part of this assignment, we had to produce a piece of audio that welcomes viewers to our online space and offers a ‘teaser’ of sorts for Element 2. It needs to include music and speech – a monologue, really. With the brief in mind and prior knowledge of audio editing software, I just got straight to work!

First things first, after being introduced to Production Plans in our seminar, I went home and began working on my production plan for this part of the assignment. I started by writing out my script in notes, and then I transferred it to the production plan once I was happy with it. For the music in the background, I went on a royalty-free music website and scrolled through until I found something that matched my desired vibe: I wanted something more on the chill side that was still upbeat.

Once I’d picked the music, the most time-consuming part was recording my monologue and then putting it together with the music. Firstly, it was important for me to enunciate my words properly so they’d be understood just as audio: I spent a lot of time going over my diction for each sentence slowly. Then, I had to ensure that the levels in the mix allowed for my speech to be audible even when background music was added. Once I thought that it was balanced enough, I was thinking of adding sound effects, but I felt like that might make it too busy for my tastes, and so I added a fade-in and fade-out before exporting.

For the last part of our element 1 submission, we had to produce photographic storyboards that would later lead to the video that we produce in element 2. The most important things to consider were using many different types of shots, understanding the appropriate terminology (e.g. shot types), and ensuring that they were feasible to turn into a movie.

My first step was to put on some music, close my eyes, and visualise a film: this is usually how I begin my ideation process. The majority of what I saw were extreme long shots, pretty close-ups, and a mixture of static shots and slow panning shots. One important detail, though, was that everything was in Wembley Park – I think I have a lot of fond memories of that place, and I also live there at the moment, so I decided that the best course of action would be to just go outside and decide on my shots based on my memories in these locations.

In my head, I mainly envisioned doing a documentary sort of video for element 2, where I could document ‘concert culture’ – specifically, K-Pop concert culture, and I could maybe explore a little bit into how it differes from ‘Western’ concert culture. As somebody who frequents both K-Pop and Western concerts, I have singlehandedly noticed a difference in both fan attitudes and artist behaviours, and I feel like it’d both be self-gratifying and unique to do a video based on this.

In the storyboards, I reflected what I would imagine to be the opening sequence of the film, which paints a calm and rather clear picture of Wembley Park on a normal afternoon. In the production for element 2, I plan to contrast this in the following scene with the loud, packed, busy environments in the exact same locations but on event days.