Component 3: Lyric Sheet

Here is the lyric sheet for our music video project. Me and my teammates (Kalista, Chelsea, and Rara) all contributed on this as we discussed on our ideas for the narrative. This blog post is written by Chelsea.

After finalising our chosen song, our teacher helped us to print our song's lyric sheet, and we began by verballing discussing our thoughts and ideas as a group after each of us had proposed our own ideas and brainstormed which of the concepts we all agreed with. We all agree that, because of the upbeat rhythm of the song, we want our music video to feature both performance (dancing or lip-syncing) and a little bit of narrative elements as well. 

Below is the lyric paper sheet we've discussed during class: 

At the beginning we all have various perspectives and thoughts, which leads to some misunderstandings and uncertainty. Audrey and I imagined the music to be angsty in terms of mood, and the star will radiate the vibes of a stargirl (confident, bold, and unconcerned about what others say), dressed in bold colours like red and black and wearing heavy makeup. Meanwhile, my other teammates, Rara and Kalista, thought the entire music video would feature a sweet, vulnerable, innocent-looking star wearing white or light-colored clothes and light makeup, which contrasted my and my other teammates' ideas. 

This idea clash took a long time to resolve, but we eventually came up with a satisfactory solution. To resolve this, we all went through the song's lyrics and original music video again, searching for the song's meaning (which will be explained further in the song research blogpost), and then we came up with an interesting idea. Given that the song revolves around a one-sided relationship in which the female star is being "played" (taken advantage of or manipulated) by the man, we want to add a twist to our music video. We decided that during the first half of the song, we would represent the star as innocent, fragile, and desperate for love (aligned with Kalista and Rara's idea). The second half of the song reveals that the main star is not as innocent as she appears, and that she is actually the "player" (aligned with Audrey and my idea). We also wanted to incorporate various connotations throughout the music video.

We were unable to annotate all parts of the lyrics on time since gathering thoughts that we all agreed on took up a significant amount of time in class. And, because meeting together face to face to work on this would be ineffective, we decided to change our lyric sheet discussion method by utilising digital media tools, which makes discussion more efficient, rather than one of us bringing the paper home and having to write all of the notes on their own. 

Below is the lyric paper sheet we transferred and gathered our ideas on Google Docs:

 Click here to access the link directly to the file for our music video lyric sheet.

We choose Google Docs to discuss and annotate our song lyrics because it is easier to highlight a part of a lyric and then adding comments to it. It is also more effective because it will not be a burden if the idea needs to be changed (which we have done several times); it is as simple as deleting and commenting on a new one, compared to doing it on paper, where you we must repeatedly erase and write a new one, which can be time consuming. It has also been easy for us to give comments and additional notes for a specific scene, especially if a member was absent while working and can be checked later, so not all members must be present at the same time but still collaborate together.

Selecting a part of the song lyric: 

Adding comments and additional notes:

Here we also utilised Google Meet to discuss our ideas together via online:

Unfortunately, embedding the Google Doc file to this blogpost does not let viewers to see the comments we've made. Hence, we tried to find another alternative solution for this problem. 

I began searching for whiteboard online applications that we could use and embed, and I came across one called Mural. I had no prior knowledge with this application, but I was able to figure it all out quickly because the user interface made it simple and guided me through the lyric sheet development process. So, I transferred all of the lyrics and annotations we made on the Google Doc, and my teammate Audrey helped me out with this. 

I used different coloured sticky notes to make it easier to differentiate between each part of the song (e.g., purple for verse, yellow for chorus). Aside from this feature, I discovered what makes this application stand out compared to Google Docs. Aside from the vibrant visuals we can use, I can also embed YouTube videos (since we got a loads of inspiration and references from other music videos and movies), so we can easily refer back to the inspiration simply by just watching the embedded video in the same window. 

Below is our final lyric sheet using the application, Mural: 

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𝑺𝒆𝒍𝒇 𝑹𝒆𝒇𝒍𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏:

I was at first so stoked to get started on planning for our music video but I did not know how stressful it could be. There so many things to consider from the main plot and the technical elements. Not only that, we had to make sure all of the ideas would lead up to a certain meaning that the audience could interpret and make sure the technical elements conform and subvert to the generic conventions. We have to be really careful and precise when planning on lyric sheet because it's marked as the final narrative. Therefore, discussing with the group is really important to do. There are so many instances where our group cannot meet up physically which is why we conducted an online/virtual meeting along with texts in Whatsapp which is our main platform for communication. As a team, we need to be able to see eye-to-eye which is really time-consuming when discussing and setting a right and fixed narrative as we had to decided bar-to-bar and this task can't be divided and delegated. However, we got to finish it before submission and it was satisfactory.