A 6 minute self produced, directed, written, starred in, and edited video by Eric Aldas
dw
This spring semester I embarked on a personal journey to accompany one of my unreleased songs “Reverie” with a music video. This was my first time fully producing, directing, being my own lead role and fully editing a video project at BYU-Idaho. This was only possible with the help of other Communications students such as Jason Ovalle and Melia Dotson, as well as non-comm students such as Aiken Villafuerte, Gabriel Ilagan, and Nicole Morales.
What is the song about?
“Reverie” speaks on a few things, fearing the departure of a loved one, wanting to experience absolutely everything physically possible with a loved one, and being brutally honest about ones weaknesses when in a relationship with another. There’s a mentioning of parents knowing that their child is full of dreams, yet they only have nightmares about their child, which is discussing the fact that no matter what, you’ll always be your parents baby. It’s best to bring up sensitive topics because that generates conversation instead of avoidance.
I made this song well over a year ago with my dear friend Matthew Fabian back home, featuring ad-lib vocals from another dear friend, Julio Tistoj. It was a way for me to express my love for all of the people around me, to experiment with longer songs and more fulfilling production and vocals. This project has been in development since 2022.
When will the song come out?
This project took an equal amount of time that my current COMM-465 (Advanced Moving Image 2) short films are taking, ensuring that there’s a tremendous amount of effort in not only the visuals, but the meanings behind them (along the music).
Not only is this song planned to be the title track to an upcoming project under my moniker “Aftertaste”, this video consists of two different teasers to other tracks within the project. The beginning portion features a stripped back ballad temporarily named “you never sing me your songs”. The outro features a more fleshed out and collaborative track named “everything 2 (outside)”. All three tracks will be available in the album under the same name “Reverie”, on October 16th of this year.
Challenges & Achievements
A large contender of difficulty within this semester derives solely on my lack of technology to edit the footage outside of campus’ resources. While this usually isn’t an issue, I also had many days of time taken up by shoot days & editing days for the earlier mentioned short films for my COMM-465 course. As well as combating two online courses and a practicum.
My mental and physical health did take a hit, but I was able to pick myself back up in order to present a majority of this video for our June 25th Project Presentations. I also found myself adding a lot more content than originally planned regarding post production. I met my goal of being able to go from a script, to a storyboard, then basic cut, and a final product.
I do plan on using this same footage for Spotify/Apple Music “Canvas” products for all 3 of the mentioned songs,and teasers on my social media. I have been properly teasing the creation and the release of this 6 minute video through my artist Instagram account @imaftertaste using stories and instants for “those who were there”.
What I learned
Every semester harbors a great amount of lessons and challenges for us students. This semester taught me the most about time management, motivation, creativity blocks, and coordination with others who don’t work for you.
Getting on top of things is extremely important when it comes to the entire process of a video project. Usually there is a team full of different roles that hold different responsibilities towards one common goal. I was 80% of the roles within this project and I fell behind quick, catching up was a different story.
Finding the motivation to sit down and draw out every expected visual happened to be the hardest difficulty, purely out of lack of motivation and exhaustion from the rest of my responsibilities. I also happened to have an opposite schedule as my mentor, Brother Mawlam, and when falling behind, it was hard to meet with him to give consistent updates, that was my biggest mistake.
While I always appreciate the help I was able to recieve, a lot of it was based solely on the schedules of those who can help me. I had a lot of motivation from those around me, as well as those back home. Thank you for reading, and thank you for watching.
Give me a follow!
Let me know how you felt about the video!