We Made a Music Video
I bet those who are interested in music have at least thought about making songs and writing lyrics once or twice. In fact, I did try them with my guitar and piano a couple times when I was in high school, but it was never a serious thing and it was too embarrassing for me to release them since the quality was just…bad. However, I recently got a chance to do something like this on behalf of the final group project in English Listening & Speaking III.
this is our final music video! feel free to watch it :)
It was during November that the whole class voted for how the final project should be presented. To my surprise, my former group’s proposal was the most voted one, which is to produce a song by using an existing instrumental and adapting the lyrics in order to promote or introduce one kind of energy.
Since nuclear power is the second largest power generation in the world, we thought maybe it’d be easier. Later on, I nominated the song “Industry Baby” by Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow to my group members because I like how it gives off the vibe of “telling everyone I’m the best” and it was quickly accepted by them. We started out by adapting the lyrics, which took us more than 4 hours in total. It was a real struggle for us to compose lyrics about nuclear as it’s obviously not a common theme. Especially in the rapping parts, it is crucial to rhyme in lines. Yet, I gradually got the hang of it after the first hour of writing and even came up with some good lines (in my opinion). My personal favorite line of all is “I’m the best for futures / Y’all producing' smokes, didn’t make you cooler but some losers” and “I’m the power king y’all get offended by seeing me in the top three”, which are in my verse 3. I love how they rhyme perfectly and also match the meaning of the whole song.
the mysterious place where we recorded our vocals
Next, it’s the part where we recorded the vocals. In a song that consists of raps, having the sense of rhythm and catching up the beat is fundamental. I listen to some hip pop and rap rock artists, so singing raps has been a hobby that I’ve been into for quite a long time. With my ability to do that, I kind of helped my teammates to reach the state of not falling behind or speeding up while singing or rapping. One of my teammates went practicing for more than 30 minutes before he finally got the perfect recording. Although we spent hours recording and editing the track, there were still some tiny mistakes. Yet, I knew for a fact that if I let my perfectionism slide this time, we would have kept redoing the work until maybe 3 or 4 am. Thus, at the time when it was almost midnight, we finished it and called it a day.
Then, we went filming a music video for the song. We looked over the original music video and decided to imitate some of its shots, which are something in between performance video and storyline video. We spent an hour writing the detailed shot list, and then took approximately 7 hours filming all the clips. To be honest, we really thought this would be the most exhausting part of the production due to the crazy number that we had for our shots, but it turned out that we had so much fun during the shooting process. Most of the time we nearly died of embarrassment when filming some goofy moves and with silly accessories; for example, there’s this one shot that I sat backwards on the backseat of a bike with a pair of sunglasses while rapping and the people passing by were just looking straight at me the whole time. Also, the camera person found it really hard to be stable while trying to catch up to the speed of a bike going downhill. Despite the fact that refilming takes a lot of time, tons of funny bloopers for us to laugh at were made.
a real footage of me messing up the lip syncing
(maybe the 10th time in a row lol)
my teammates' review for the music video
I ended up being the editor as the videos were all filmed by my phone and I had a pretty clear picture of how I wanted it to be like. Combining all the clips together and putting up the captions are not a difficult task to do, but my perfectionistic self still finished the entire editing after about 4 hours. A weight was finally lifted off my shoulder after working so hard for a project. Surprisingly, my group members’ reaction did not disappoint at all. They gave me excellent reviews about the music video, including the visual, the rhythm, and even the unexpected bloopers that I put at the end of the video. At that time, I felt appreciated and was so proud of myself. I honestly never thought that I could do all these things, like writing lyrics, directing, and editing. I don’t know how to describe how happy I was when being complimented for something that I didn’t think I was good at.
Last but not least, I want to truly thank my teammates for putting so much effort together. This is the coolest project I’ve ever done in college so far, and it will surely be an unforgettable memory and experience for me to reminisce about in the future.