My music video “Butterfly”, may not be a perfect music video, but it will remain solitarily in my heart since it has given me experiences on filming, script - writing, maybe a bit of directing and film editing. It aims to convey sympathy, understanding, and comfort to those dealing with mental issues and worries. This evaluation essay will provide a deeper understanding of the process and the music video itself.
As aforementioned, The music video aims to provide comfort and sympathy to teenagers who have experienced mental oppression by adults and society's norms. It is particularly relevant to Asian teenagers, particularly Vietnamese, who often face academic pressure to achieve recognition or college admission. This pressure creates an invisible layer of pressure, making them feel restless and afraid to rebel. The video represents the problems of adult expectations and harsh societal criteria applied to teenagers' lives, and the responsibility they have as young adults.
The music video portrays the situation in an abstract and subtle way, with the protagonist waking up in a different place, separated from their soul and bruised feet. The surrounding atmosphere represents a box where the protagonist seeks strength and strength from their own heart. The butterfly symbolizes the vulnerability of young adults who have to retain their concerns and pains as scars.
The music video presents the problems in both negative and positive ways, with 75% leaning more to the negative side. It does not contain many stereotypes, as the first intention was to demonstrate the pain. However, the transformation of the dragon symbolizes a change in the protagonist, as they will never be stuck with the pain forever. In conclusion, the music video delivers the message in both a negative and sympathetic way, while also containing stereotypes.
For the digipak, my initial plan was to design it into 2 versions, each of them having different covers. The first one is the dancer himself, in which I named it the butterfly, the other one is human since it indicates myself, as the fictional artist. The concept photos used for social media pages and the cover will be the same with each other, except for the social media, which have more concept photos been shown. The elements on the cover were simple, as there are not many details, beside the name of the single, artist’s name and the tracks list. The color scheme also follows the film convention, which is Wong Kar Wai style of color grading. However, in order to make it look more somber, me and the D.O.P member decided to slightly change the tone into a more dark and cold tone, it stills emphasize the lightning into the main subject, like how the lightning in Fallen Angels work, the only change in here is the color tone, from blue to dark purple.
As for my research about artists that have similar genres as mine, for instance, wave to earth, their album design was really simple, as there is only a picture with 2 lines that indicate their name, album title and volume number. My main aim is to show the context of the music video and the song through the image, in which was emphasized more.
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| Earlier plan of my digipak |
I applied the style of the wave to earth album into the human version, since it’s simple and easy to emphasize the subject in the image. The title on the album was enough to let the audience know what the song is and who performed it. As we can see from the comparison here, most of the layout and the amount of typos in these two covers were little, and they mainly focus on the image. At first, I was planned to create a much bigger, fussily and stunning title, yet, I realized that some of the fonts are not suitable for the theme and the concept, therefore, I chose to follow a more subtle way, which is used a San serif font, more specifically is PP Mori, for the album and artist name in the front cover.
From left to right
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wave to earth - 01. flaws and all album front cover
and my “Butterfly” digipak front cover.
For the first version of the album, I decided to edit the concept photos in a style of being shown with spotlights, surrounded by dust, sparkles and glitters. The foreground color will be all black, but the subject and other elements will be white, jotted some gold shimmers as for the sparkles. The typos of this version will also be the same, yet, the typos will only be applied for the back covers, since my intention is to show and portray the beauty of the dancer, also the butterfly figure itself. This cover was also inspired by Crush’s single album - wanderlust, as for the front cover of his album is just a picture of himself with a dog, the picture seems to be underexposed and there isn't much lighting emphasized on the subject. That is the only difference on my album cover, since there is a huge amount of lightning emphasis on the subject. The rest of the album still follows the same concept with the human version.
After all, the final result of the digipak has achieve the sense of branding, in which it resemblance exactly how the initial plans was created, for instance, the effect on the dancers body in which there are quite excessive lighting and the Wong Kar Wai's influence for the artist featured version of the digipak. They're also similar to the music video, as the evidences are shown below.
My aimed target audience is any typical individual, regardless of gender, with a normal appearance and disposition. They are unique with unique hobbies, speech patterns, and fashion senses, yet blend in with their social circles. The audience may be more laid back, preferring to watch them play and smile broadly or silent during small talk, or being caught crying for something that is not aimed for that purpose. They may have held onto things they want to discuss due to frustration, but fearing no one will understand or find it wrong.
The music video main gratification "Personal Identity", explores how people use media, such as entertainment, social media, and self-help books, to understand their identity and place in the world. The video aims to be a sympathetic source for vulnerable people, particularly teenagers, who may be triggered by societal norms and stereotypes. The dragon serves as a metaphor for the dragon, representing passion, talents, and efforts to prove one's worth. The video encourages viewers to sympathize with themselves and not be afraid to change and be themselves. It also serves as an entertainment source, as people can watch the video on YouTube after a long day to relax and enjoy the message. The abstract and metaphorical nature of the video can help people find their true self and overcome societal norms and expectations.
The music video in this text is not original but mainly influenced by Wong Kar Wai's movies, particularly the use of color schemes and editing. To summarize the conventions, Wong Kar Wai’s traits in most of his movies are the use of color schemes, uncontrollable timeline and the editing. For instance, the main inspiration, the color grading of Fallen Angels was used for the montage, representing nostalgia, loneliness, and urban alienation. The blue color in the movie was used to create a gloomy, melancholy vibe, emphasizing the character's loneliness and helplessness. Step-printing shots were also used for the bridge part, creating a solid and awkward transition. The bridge part features the character running back and forth, trying to escape the "box." These conventions are crucial in the music video, as they help to convey the themes of nostalgia, loneliness, and urban alienation in Wong Kar Wai's films.
The dancing sequel was actually taken inspiration from LOONA’s “Butterfly” music video, as they use small footage of actors doing their solo dances in different places. However, the convention for this sequel is broken due to the location that used to shoot all of the footage. The first element to be broken is the location, as it is filming indoors, not to mention most of the lighting were artificial, except for the last chorus part. The last chorus part also broke the convention, as the dancer was recorded as a silhouette, fully covered in black, none of the lighting emphasized the main subject of the footage. Another convention that were used in the dance footages is a short video of The8 (Seventeen) doing his contemporary dance on “idontwannabeyouanymore (Billie Eilish, 2019)” in which the idea of the spotlight on the dancer was “borrowed” from that.
The last convention that I used for this music video, from the post - credit scene, the application of dragon scales on the arm. This is actually inspired by the film Luca (Enrico Casarosa, 2021), as indicated to a detail of the arms of Luca Paguro and Alberto Scorfano appeared fish scales whenever their arm was exposed to water. In the music video, the dragon scales appear with no exposure to anything physically, but indicated as a “gift” to transform into something else more powerful and free.
In conclusion, the overall production went quite smoothly for both filming and designing process. However, I still quite regret the decision of filming the montage in the afternoon, which can be hard to depict the night time atmosphere. Furthermore, I should be more flexible with the design process, which is to explore more photo editing applications to speed up the editing process.
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