EDM Engineered
In my graduate course titled, “Content Creation,” I created a three-part YouTube series focusing on three different topics about my favorite genre of music, electronic dance music (EDM). Below is my creative process throughout this project.
The Idea
When I was in middle school, I used to create YouTube music videos and share them all over the internet. Nowadays, I love to make vlogs and TikToks about my life so I knew for my creative project that I wanted to make videos. I was so sick of creating social media campaigns so I decided to do something different that I was somewhat familiar with and that was making a YouTube channel.
Picking out the topic of what these videos were going to be about was the hardest part. I thought about everything I'm interested in like college, cheerleading, working out but then it hit me: electronic dance music. My dad was a DJ while he was in college and my brother DJs now so I've been around this type of music my entire life. Getting the opportunity to learn more about the genre and create content out of it felt like a dream come true.
The Proposal
Once I had the idea of my project in mind, I needed to figure out exactly what was going to go into it. What is the theme of the videos? What do I want to tell my audience? How am I going to create the series? All of these questions and more are answered in my proposal.
Pre-Production
Weeks 3 and 4 were dedicated to the pre-production stages of this project. On Prime Day, I bought myself an iPad for this project and borrowed a microphone from a friend. This was to ensure I had the correct equipment needed to create a great YouTube series.
During these two weeks, I conducted hours of research to write up three scripts for each episode, video tested with my iPad, audio tested with the microphone and sketched out a storyboard on Canva. These drafts were essential to complete before I got into the production process of the videos.
Production
Although production only lasted one week, there was a lot accomplished in the single week. I polished up my YouTube channel to have my logo and branding be consistent with my pink and blue colors. I also added a bio and my socials to the channel.
I recorded my three episodes, two being back to back and one being in the second half the week due to my father and brother's schedules. Each video took about one hour to film with multiple takes in between each good one.
Once each video was filmed, I uploaded the footage to Adobe Rush and cut down the raw footage so the editing process would be easier for me to complete.
Post-Production
Weeks 6 and 7 were definitely the hardest out of all. I started editing my videos in week 6 and realized this was going to take me longer than expected. I found outside images and video footage to add on top of my video to give my audience visual context.
I finished Episode 1 in week 6 and Episodes 2 and 3 in week 7. After I was done editing, I audience tested them for my roommates to see if there were any edits needed. They gave me suggestions of adding more images and examples, so I followed.
After fully polishing the episodes, I created thumbnails for each video and uploaded them to my YouTube channel. I spread the link out to my peers and family members and have been receiving positive feedback since!
Finished Videos
Final Thoughts
The Plan
Once my proposal was finished, I need to lay out everything I needed to accomplish. The best management system I found was Trello where I was able to break my plan into five stages: preliminary, research, pre-production, production and post-production.
Each stage has multiple tasks and each task has a checklist of things I need to do in order to complete the task. I also broke up the three main stages into specifics weeks. I allotted weeks 3 and 4 for pre-production, week 5 for production and weeks 6 and 7 for post production. This management system worked out in my favor and allowed me to stay on track.
Weeks 6 and 7 were definitely the hardest out of all. I started editing my videos in week 6 and realized this was going to take me longer than expected. I found outside images and video footage to add on top of my video to give my audience visual context.
I finished Episode 1 in week 6 and Episodes 2 and 3 in week 7. After I was done editing, I audience tested them for my roommates to see if there were any edits needed. They gave me suggestions of adding more images and examples, so I followed.
After fully polishing the episodes, I created thumbnails for each video and uploaded them to my YouTube channel. I spread the link out to my peers and family members and have been receiving positive feedback since!