The Brief
I created this music video for my first assignment in my 2025 film class at Whangarei Girls’ High. I submitted this assessment on the 23rd of May, 2025. As it was a solo project, my creative role was that of director, cinematographer, animator, and editor.
The assessment itself was to ‘produce a resolved work that demonstrates control of skills appropriate to cultural conventions’. For an excellence grade, the music video had to incorporate key conventions of a music video to create an effective product that has a clear consideration of an audience, utilises evident creativity, and shows consistent mastery of production technology.
My goal in creating this music video was to explore an alternative reality inspired by the 2011 game, Alice Madness Returns, and the 2010 film, Alice in Wonderland. The key conventions I used to succeed in this outcome were animation, pace, general editing, title graphics, shot types, characters, and narrative. I chose the song “GhostRide” by the artist Crumb.
The most notable convention I explored was animation, utilising Adobe After Effects and Photoshop to do so. I created separate puppets for each character, and used ‘parenting’ techniques in After Effects to link layers together. Afterwards, I brought these After Effects files into Premiere Pro and layered them alongside my ‘real-life’ video footage.
The pre-production planning and moodboard were also taken into consideration for this assessment, and so I worked on developing storyboards, inspirational images, and made notes of my evolving creative decisions.