JC Deadline

We have now handed in our rough cut for the music video and today we will be viewing all the videos in class so that we can get some audience feed back in order to make any final adjustments that are neccasery before the final deadline on Thursday.

The advertisement and digipak have now been handed in. We made changes on the last couple of days by changing the background colour, adjusting the text so that our font was clearly readable over our artistic background and done a lot of photoshop to get our band images how we wanted them. We used two images on the inside pages and another on the front cover, the front cover image involved making the band members have a yellow wash over them.

We are very pleased with the work we have done and are confident of the quality of it. I think all three of us are looking forward to the audience feedback that we recieve so that we can make our evaluation and move towards the exam knowing we have done 75% of the work.

final digipaks

These are our final digital pieces for the digipak and advertisment for 'Kerrang'. We diecided to use the same sort of background as a motif for both and kept them to minimal colours. This conforms to the typical forms of this genre. The text is also goth like and so adds to the whole feel of the digital art.

SF - digiak and advertisment 1

For our digipak and advertisement we have decided to use an abstract design on the entire album cover, but with a picture of the band on one of the inside covers so that we are working within the conventions of the genre. We have included a font called 'mutlu ornamental' which we found on 'dafont.com' This was so that we had an old fashioned style of writing to use so that we could work within and utilise our idea of the silent movie style.

JC-Approaching Deadline

We are now in our final week before the deadline and we are doing very well.
The advert is done how we want it to be, and we think it conforms to the right conventions. The digipak back cover is complete, the front cover is complete, and the inside is almost done, we are just waiting to do a photo shoot with the band to put a picture inside.
We have put constructed our special effects shots, such as the face off, the ghost effect and the inter-fading in the important low angle shot.
We have been putting our video together against the animatic, with most shots correct to how we did the animatic. We have managed to sync up a lot of the singing and drum shots and the narrative section works well, making the significant parts of the song match up with the introduction of new parts of the silent movie sequence.
We are confident that the rough cut will be complete in time for the deadline, and are very pleased with the work so far. We have approx two minutes of the song that has footage that is likely to stay like it is, leaving just over a minute to be moved about to make it what we consider perfect.

SF - Rough Cut 1

We are now working towards our rough cut for the video meaning the shots will be edited to the extent that we can use our footage to carry out some audience research for our evaluation. We have used effects to darken our performance shots which works well with the fact that all the band members are wearing black shirts, a generic convention of the genre, meaning that with the darkened performance shots we can capture the mood of our track. This is because through the verses of our track, there is a sense of foreboding, suggesting the idea of darkness or sinister situations.

SF - progress with editing

We have begun editing our music video so that we can put the performance and narrative parts of the video together. It seems to be going quite well as we have managed to put together some brilliant cuts and transitions, such as from the ghosting shot into a shot of our singer. We have used different types of shots for the piece, such as using an intertextual reference from a video by '30 Seconds to Mars' using a face-off shot as they did to indicate the idea of an inner struggle or meeting the other side of your personality.

JC-Our Footage

We have captured the footage from our first location shoot and also from our first studio shoot.
From doing this we have been able to see which shots have been successful and which shots need redoing. Hence when we went out to do our big location shoot we also knew that some of our previous shots had to be redone.
We have taken some extra shots to be able to fill up any time without too much repetition, as the track is still quite long. This will mean that our storyboard will not be exactly what the video looks like, we hope this will be an improvement and that the clips will sync with the track to make the video more understandable and coincide with what the band sing about.
We have begun some of the editing, and will be getting a good picture of how things are going to look when put together over the next few days.

JC-Location shoot evalutation.

Today we did our shoot on our external location.
This was a successful shoot which we were very pleased with, hopefully we have got good enough quality to not require a reshoot.
I was director today as well as cameraman.
Scott was also cameraman and props manager.
Tom and Natasha were our actors.
We got all the shots we needed and we did so quite efficiently, taking extra shots to ensure retakes weren't required and also managing to get a few shots that we didnt initially plan.
We made sure the costumes were correct to what we had planned and the make up applied according to our research.
Tomorrow we will have our next shoot in the studio and then we should have all of our footage.

JC-Location Shoot #2

This weekend we plan to have our big shoot at our external location.
This will involve the important shots with the lead singer and the girl.
Shots that we specifically need to do are:
Face-Off shot.
Ghosting effect of girl over tracks.
Singer Walking on track.
Tracking shots.
The bridge. (Above-High Angle-Under-Low Angle)
Girl following singer.
In train shots.

We will also be using a few ideal shots that can be used as filler shots.

JC- Studio Shoot

I have just captured the footage from the studio shot which was done whilst I was absent. There is some great footage of the band playing and shots of individual members of the band.

The meat shot, which is essentially the most important shot of the band needs reshooting as the bassist is too far away from the rest of the band and means that he goes out of frame a few times.
I have realised, after looking at the footage we have got, how important the direction of people's eyes are. For this reason, some of the close ups of the singer need to be reshot. We have also decided that when we redo some of these shots, that a shot of the singer under a solo spotlight would be a good idea.
In some of the performance shots, when the drummer is not playing it looks like he may be texting behind the symbol so when the band are playing it needs to look like the whole band are involved in this performance, so the band members look involved, and if they have any movement whilst playing, they dont stare at the floor all the time.
We plan to reshoot a few of the studio shots to include some camera movement, for this we will require the dolly for the camera, we want some sweeping shots across the band playing. The shots need to be composed for the best framing, and the stage lighting needs to be combined in to make the performance seem authentic.
It would also be nice to have a few flash cuts to different things, like parts of the drum kit, the guitar, the players faces, the stage lights etc

We should reshoot, with mulitple angles:
Intro, CU of singer(spotlight)/guitarist
Drummer playing (different cam positions)
Band's faces
Meat shot
"Burning on the inside"

SF -performance shoot

We have now done the shoot for the performance part of the music video which seemed to go quite well. It was best for us to attempt each shot from multiple angles and also multiple times so that we could see which angle works best and also to ensure that we could get the best shots possible. This also allows us to work out whether or not we would need to reshoot anything due to errors by the performers or the cameraman. However, we managed to successfully make the most of of our opportunity to film the people performing in the video, using our animatic as a guideline for our shots.

TJ - Advertisement Ideas

These are my ideas of layout for our advertisemnet for the digipak. it is only an idea due to needing take our own pictures and put them into the advert. I developed it by changing the font colour and changing the background picture as well as adding an old paper texture to it.

TJ - Digipak Ideas

These are some of my digipak ideas. also with fire layered over the top. I have gone with band images as ive found that most bands have pictures of them in the digipak, either performing or backstage. this is to let the buyer experience them offstage as well as listen to them.

SF - Digipak ideas

We have been putting forward ideas for our digipak design, including designing a draft copy with our ideas. The ideas put forward on my digipak were using shots that we hope to use in our locations, such as a shot of eyes looking through fire and a train coming through steam and smoke, with a shot of the band included on the inside cover. Some of my design did not really work with the idea although we managed to agree on the idea of fire as it relates to one of the key lines in the track , 'burning on the inside' which relates to the eyes appearing through fire. Going from the top left and round the pictures are eyes appearing through fire, a picture of the band, a train going through smoke and then fire around the edge of the cover with the name of the track in the middle at the top.