It’s down to the wire, on this project I have one week left and have almost completed all of it. This past week I finished designing and animating all of my graphics and added into each of their corresponding projects. I also finished cutting down each 40 minute interview into the best few minutes of each and for two of the interviews I had to add them into After Effects and create audio waves to keep the audio interviews visual and interesting. I have worked quite a lot in After Effects but this was something that I hadn’t done yet so I used a youtube video to guide me through the process. I personally like Flat Pack FX Youtube page when it comes too easy to follow After Effects tutorials. He pauses often throughout the video to give viewers time to catch up and he goes above and beyond to not only complete the task but to also refine what you made and add extra flourishes to make it look really nice. For example in the specific video I used he not only showed how to make an audio wave respond to your audio file, but to also make a constantly flowing wave in the background to make a more aesthetically pleasing and dynamic composition.
After finishing the interviews and animations, which took most of the week due to the high amount of illustrating that had to be done before animating, I moved onto finding royalty free boy band music and editing it into each episode. In order to keep the episode similar and tie them together like a real series, each episode has the same intro and outro music. Then for the background music of each episode I wanted to pick instrumental versions of songs done by the specific bands I was talking about in that episode. From there I took all the names of the music owners and created individual episode descriptions for Youtube. Back in undergrad when I was the Executive Producer of one of the Q30 television shows I had to write show writes up for Youtube for each episode, but I felt that this type of series called for a more structured and informational description. So I looked up the best practices for youtube descriptions and came across a popular blog on Hootsuite, “How to Write the Best YouTube Descriptions: Tips and Examples”. The blog talked about the importance of key words and making sure you repeat them and keep them uniform within each description that is posted. The blog also suggested that you use hyperlinks and stay human and conversational to entice people to click further and learn more about your topic. For my descriptions I included hyperlinks to the pages that U download music from and will be including links to some of the best boy band sources so viewers can learn even more.
The final thing I have to finish is adding the last bit of stock picture and videos and then I can export and upload to YouTube. I am also going to take one of the illustrations I designed for each episode and use it as a header image for my whole Youtube page.
On a completely different note, even though it’s been a few weeks since I’ve done research on the topic of boy bands a huge breakthrough occurred for one of the boy bands that I’m covering in this project so I felt I needed to look deeper into the news. It was said this past Tuesday that BTS just had a law made for them in Korea that allows them to defer their mandatory military sentence from age 28 to age 30. This is great news for the band because their oldest member turned 28 the day after and originally was going to have to apply for military duties and possibly leave the band, but now can choose to wait 2 more years and keep the success of the band going.
This news comes right after the band broke another record for having both their single and album debut at number one at the same time. When I first started this project I knew I already had a lot of knowledge about all eras of boy bands but the one that I felt least prepared to talk about was K-pop and throughout the process of this project I have learned so much about them and really learned to appreciate just how different yet incredible they are. The hours upon hours of hard work that goes into just one of their performances is incredible.
Overall, I’m excited to finish and upload the project so people can actually watch the video and I’m hoping I can get some really constructive and good feedback.
To see out how long each task I completed this week took, check out the week 6 Production Journal.
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