Critical Reflection Last Christmas by wham! By Kayla O’Reilly

How does your product Use or challenge conventions? This music video challenges the original music video, but also uses some of the original conventions. In the original music video Last Christmas by Wham! there were not any Christmas lights. Instead in the original video there was snow everywhere. We were not able to use snow in our video because of our location. There was, however, one Christmas tree scene but it did not have lights on it like our video did. The original music video also does not use words at the beginning like we did. The original video uses words at the end to say thank you to the viewers but never once did they say the song title with words. We also used conventions by telling a story through out the video instead of just dancing. Just like in the original our story matches the lyrics. We also challenged conventions when we used a gay couple in the beginning. In the original video the couples were not as obvious and they were all white. Also in our other research all the people were in red or Christmas clothing. In our video we incorporated the red and we even had Christmas ponchos.

Snow vs Christmas lights This is the setting for most of the original video. Our new video beginning.

Difference in people Gay couple from our music video. Also interacial. People from the original video.

Christmas trees in both videos Tree in back ground and no lights. Tree with lights in our music video.

Use of words Original video use of only words. Our videos use of words.

How did your product address social issues or groups? Our video makes it very clear that anyone can be happy and it does not matter your race or who you like. Our video opens up with a gay couple. Also the couple happens to be interracial which most people frown upon. We promoted it in our video. Our video also addresses the topic of life goes on even after unfortunate things. Our video sends out a positive message to everyone and promotes being happy.

How does your product Engage with audiences and how will it be distributed? Our product is mostly for a mature audience, but it is not inappropriate for any age group. If children watch our video they will be entertained by the pretty lights. If a more mature audience watches our video they will understand more of the story. They would also appreciate the interracial couple and the equality. Our music video would be distributed on YouTube. YouTube gives people access to the videos again and again so the people can watch it as they please.

How did your production Skills develop? During this project my production skills developed a lot in the editing aspects. This time since we were doing a music video we had to add words. The adding of the words to the film was a little difficult at first. It took a few practice runs. I learned how to change the size and shadows of the words. One day Jordan wasn’t at school and I had to do some editing by myself. I also learned how to cut the song. At first the song was four minutes long. Since the video was so long it took so long for it to export. It originally took over 30 minutes due to the length of the song. Once I cut it the video took only about ten minutes.

How did you intergrade technologies? During this video project we used the combination of Sony cameras and a Sony tripod. We also used Adobe Premiere Pro. The Sony camera was a real camcorder. We also used the internet to post our blogs. To upload our video to the blog we used YouTube first. In this video we also used music because it was a music video. We accessed the song from YouTube and had to save it to a flash drive to upload it to the video because the district blocks it.