Interactive Project Report

Introduction

My final project for this course is an interactive timeline chronicling the top female artist from K-pop label SM Entertainment over the years. SM Entertainment is the oldest of the current K-pop labels that are still producing music. Since opening in 1995, the company has a vast repertoire of artists that it has created. In 2020, I started listening to music from the company and fell in love with the art they created. This project celebrates several musical acts that I admire and is a culmination of the skills I learned throughout the course. I spent several hours putting together these videos and am proud of the work I created.

Intended Audience and Purpose

Overall, this project will help educate people on the history of some of the most iconic K-pop groups. The intended audience for this project is newer K-pop fans who are eager to learn more about the history of SM Entertainments leading girl groups. Many people become new K-pop fans every day and may find the amount of information about the genre overwhelming. By going through this timeline project, those new fans will be able to learn more about the history of groups from the oldest K-pop label. I can speak from experience because I found it increasingly difficult to keep up with every group member's name and role as I began listening to K-pop music. By condensing the basic history of every group presented in the project, a newer fan will be able to gain an introductory knowledge of every group I have shown. Another potential audience could be fans of SM Entertainment that may be eager to learn more about other groups at the company. For example, one may be a fan of Red Velvet and may not be very familiar with a group like S.E.S. By reading through the timeline, that Red Velvet fan will be able to learn more about other groups and find a new appreciation for the acts that came before Red Velvet.

Project Features

Each video I created has specific features that indicate information about the group's musical styles and concepts. One noticeable feature is the introduction sequences for each video. These introductions grab the viewer with musical cues and specific visual cues. For the videos to function in the timeline format, every video opens with an artist's name and debut year. This format makes the video more engaging because it begins with a clear pattern throughout each video. For all groups, I added sections in their videos informing who each group member is and their role in their group. For example, the video for aespa explains that Karina's role in the group is performing as the group's leader, performing as the group's main dancer, and performing as the group's sub vocalist. This feature is key to the project because it is often hard for newer K-pop fans to learn the names of every member in a group. Presenting a segment that clearly outlines each member's name and role allows viewers to discern between every group member easily.

Frame from the video "aespa (2020)"

Another feature I employed throughout the editing process was transitional effects throughout the videos. Since I was editing several music videos together that were often vastly different from each other, I needed to employ transitions between each track. I used several fade effects and wipe video transitions to make the splices between music videos more seamless. I used fading effects for the songs and layered them over each song transition to get a seamless flow. These transitions allowed videos to flow better overall and made the videos more comprehensive to understand and more enjoyable to watch. The more enjoyable the video is, the more informative it will come across to the viewers.

One other feature that I'd like to point out from the videos is the detailed musical editing. I chose to edit each video to enjoy listening to the songs in mind. Since K-pop is a musical genre and this project targets fans of that genre, the blend of different songs needed to go well together for the viewing experience to be enhanced. Stylized text will come on the screen simultaneously as a chorus begins or at the same time that a prominent drum beat happens. These editing decisions are intentional because they help make the video more engaging for the viewer, thus making the content of the videos more enjoyable to digest.

Finally, The timeline itself has features that present specific information to the audience. Firstly, the timeline features an introductory slide to SM Entertainment to ensure that every possible audience member has at least a rudimentary understanding of the company. This slide will be beneficial for people who may not know about K-pop whatsoever and may be engaging in learning more about the genre. Another essential feature of the timeline is the detailed credits of every song presented in the videos. Since I edited multiple clips from music videos together, each of the videos I created has specific credits for the music videos spliced throughout them. By looking at the credits, viewers will be able to find each of the songs they enjoyed most from my videos and save them to their music libraries.

Process

My project began as an interactive Knightlab timeline chronicling every important SM Entertainment act that debuted since its opening. However, I was very dissatisfied with the tools presented on Knightlab when I began to embed my timeline into my Wix site. Because of this, I decided to change course and use the skills I have in Adobe Premiere to create a more thought-out project. Because of the change in the project, I had to change the project's scope as well. I decided to center my focus around the girl groups from SM Entertainment because they are the company's most well-known.

I wanted to focus on the girl groups specifically because I feel as though it is essential to document the history of impactful women. These women spread the culture of their countries on a massive global scale, and that work needs to be remembered for decades to come. Though I do have a decent knowledge of each group I created videos on, I needed to focus on researching facts on the more obscure groups. When researching for the text blurbs presented in each video, I used the website kprofiles.com. Though KProfiles is not an academic website, it is highly reliable with its information among the K-pop fanbase. The dates it has for K-pop group's debut and releases are wholly reliable. As such, I found it appropriate to use the site to aggregate facts about the history of each of the artists I presented. Using both knowledge I acquired beforehand and the group profiles found on the KProfiles website, I created each of the text boxes located throughout the videos.

For creating the videos, I began by sorting through entire discographies of the girl groups I selected to research. I found music videos that I thought would best convey each group's history and musical styles. I worked one by one on each of the videos and edited them in reverse-chronological order, starting with aespa (2020) and finishing with S.E.S. (1997). I downloaded each of the music videos I selected and went through Adobe Premiere to edit everything together. In Premiere, I created title cards and text sequences and utilized video and audio transition effects to create videos that flow well together. I uploaded every video onto YouTube after I had finished them. Uploading the videos onto YouTube meant that they would be more compatible with the Knightlab timeline software. I had tried using Google Drive to upload my videos initially, but I was not too fond of the video's format. Each video I created is in HD, and the Google Drive links were outputting very low-quality videos. Thus, the switch to YouTube uploads allowed me to have videos that were embedded quickly and fully played in HD. Finally, I created thumbnails for each video in Photoshop to give a more professional look to the timeline. I found some photos of each artist and added a white border to the images, creating a sleek effect when coupled with the video's auto-embedding on the timeline program.

Learning

Although I am pleased with the results, I also learned that my process of creating for this project was a significant undertaking. Getting each video to a place where I felt it was complete came to be a real challenge because I am a big fan of many of these artists. With that in mind, it became hard for me to decide what information may be extraneous and what information was necessary to include in the videos. I find it very hard to edit my thoughts into more coherent sentences when I'm writing papers, and that difficulty translated to my video editing. I had to go through and re-edit videos several times because I had either added too much content or too little content in different areas.

Another key takeaway from this project was the importance of working on things when you're passionate. These videos all took a very long time to edit together, and I had only a couple of days to create them. However, since I am a big fan of these groups and their music, the work didn't feel that tedious. This is an important lesson for anybody to learn from their work. The final product feels effortless if you genuinely enjoy what you're doing. That is how I felt when making these videos, and because I am a fan of all of these artists, I strove to make the videos better even through re-edits. In 2017, I used to edit concert videos in my free time, where I would compile clips from online together into one video. This project reminded me a lot of those videos because I could put my spin on the history of each group that I presented. Though the editing process became very tedious at points, I truly enjoyed compiling all of these clips into informative videos.

Finally, the most significant learning takeaway from working on this project is the importance of conveying information effectively. Since my project involved creating several videos, I needed to share information with a good visual component and concise wording of the artists I presented. I was able to get all of the information I deemed as being the most important into every video, which was my main goal. I also enjoyed that I utilized the timeline feature effectively and linked several smaller videos together instead of making a single video. Having the timeline made the project feel like it had more depth, so I enjoyed learning about its functionality. Learning about these Knightlab tools and how I can use them effectively to improve my thoughts was a great asset. They could be a great asset in any future projects I may have in my coursework throughout the rest of my time at UCSB and may become useful when I enter the workforce.