The Boy Band Breakdown

A 3-part Youtube series, created to take a deeper look into the emotional psychology, deliberate marketing and evolution of boy bands from the late 1940’s Barbershop Quartets to today’s newest success BTS.

Why Boy Bands?

Honestly, the question should be why not boy bands? Ever since the debut of the Jonas Brother’s music video for the song “Year 3000” back when I was 8, I’ve been in love with boy bands. And not just because they’re marketed to be cute heartthrobs that sing about love. It’s truly an interesting genre of music that has always interested and entertained me. But after be an absolute fanatic when I was younger for bands like One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer, I wanted to look deeper into why I was so crazy about them and why still today at the age of 21 I get excited when new news pops up about the band or a single of one of the bands.

The Project Proposal

After deciding what I wanted to research and create for the next 7 weeks I had to create a project proposal. The proposal highlights why I’m creating this, what I hope to accomplish in each episode, my target demographic/audience and the over all layout and feel for the look of the series. It also has a brief over view of the timeline and work flow I wanted to achieve while creating each video, but the project plan goes into further detail.

The Boy Band Breakdown – Project ProposalDownload

The Project Plan

My fully completed Project Management board on Asana.

Once the proposal was written, submitted and approved I had to take that plan that I had created and break. it up into more detailed yet manageable steps. And that’s what the project plan’s for. Inside the plan I break the project down into task that needed to be accomplished in pre-production, production, post-production and during youtube uploading. I also show in what weeks I wish to have each step completed and showed how I created a project management page on Asana to help keep me on task.

The Boy Band Breakdown – Project PlanDownload

Pre – Production

Now that I had a plan for the project and how I was going to execute it, it was time to actually start to work on it. The first 2 weeks I spect on arguably the most important step in any project, pre-production. In these 2 weeks I wrote all 3 episode scripts, contact and lined up my interviews, created interview questions, finished finalizing my logo, ordered and collected all the equipment I would need and completed all of my research on the topic.

The Boy Band Breakdown – Ep.1 Script Download

The Boy Band Breakdown – Ep.2 ScriptDownload

The Boy Band Breakdown – Ep.3 ScriptDownload

The Boy Band Breakdown Interview QuestionsDownload

Production

After revising my scripts a few times and making sure I had enough questions to last for a long quality interview I jumped into production on week 3. I began to actually film myself, the interviewees and recording my narrations. I spent a few days on zoom and over the phone conducting interviews that lasted anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes. Then I created my own small boy band set, that had merchandise and decorations and set up my microphone and camera to film all the intros and outros to each video. Then finally I took that same condenser mic and recorded all of my narration straight into Adobe Audition. This by far was the step that I encountered the most obstacles on, because interviews canceled and changed formats and I had to figure out how to my small room into a boy band host set.

Post Production

The last stage of the project focused on actually putting the show together making sure I created a coherent brand through out all the videos and making sure I created a series worth watching. Post-production was very ambitious for me in this project, I had to create illustrations and animations that had never really done in the past, and I had to edit my own face and voice which is usually uncomfortable to most people. This step took the longest and by the end I had created 3 different length episode, designed 3 similarly themed thumbnails and wrote all 3 episode descriptions for youtube that included hyperlinks and specific keywords.

The Boy Band Breakdown – Youtube Episode DescriptionsDownload

Final Videos

Welcome to the Boy Band Breakdown! In this first episode we’re diving deep into the origins of boy bands, and why girls of all ages have absolutely freaked out over these bands for more than 60 years! Buckle up, because we’re going from Barbershop Quartets, to The Beatles, to today’s Boy Bands. It’s gonna be a ton of fun and you might even learn a thing or two!!

Welcome back to the Boy Band Breakdown! In this second episode we’re moving on through history to the next biggest phase of boy bands. The 90’s! This decade brought the iconic boy bands we know and love like The Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. We’re taking a look at how specific marketing, tightly choreographed dances and matching outfits made every teenage girl swoon over these boys for over a decade!

Welcome back to the final episode in the Boy Band Breakdown series! In the 3rd episode we are taking a look at the new era of boy bands that hit the scene in the early 2010’s and are still around today. This includes the world famous One Direction, Jonas Brothers and K-pop’s biggest sensation BTS. We’re also taking a deeper look into the actual meaning of a boy band and asking if certain bands should have ever been called one in the first place!

Conclusion

Overall, I would say the project was a success! Now, did it come exactly how I had envisioned it from the beginning… no, but I rolled with the punched, learned many new techniques in premiere, audition, after effects, photoshop and procreate and created a 3-part youtube series, which I had never done before. There were definitely mistakes made along the way, but I’m happy with these videos as my first attempt at youtube and I hope to continue to learn about this topic and hopefully create more videos down the road with different ideas and new techniques.