Friday 9 December 2011

Music video draft: audience feedback

The audience feedback overall was rather positive, one of the key parts people said was good, was the camera angles and shots.

one of the areas which was brought up, was the colour grading, whilst throughout the majority of the video, the colour grading was correct, giving a slight blue tint, in some places the colours looked very bleached out.

also brought up was how in one location the singer was both lip syncing and keeping his mouth closed when the track had vocals, someone suggested that perhaps to keep it more consistent and either have him lip syncing or not in the same location. I chose to keep this in as it helped to reinforce the subdued feel of the video and song.

Friday 2 December 2011

Magazine Advert: Continued Research

Whilst looking at the various magazines I started thinking of the various elements the advert would need to include, for the final magazine advert I want it to be quite simplistic, which fits the style created with the digipack and music video.

I knew I would have to include the band name and album name, perhaps the name of the song "bad dreams" which the music video is for.
Also the name and logo of the record company would be needed.
I chose to include a quote as well, from a well known music magazine such a nme, or kerrang as it is more appropriate to my genre.

Thursday 1 December 2011

Music Video: 3rd video shoot

On this final shooting weekend, I captured the footage of the hill scene, this was the complete performance part of the video with the entire band performing with equipment,

The shoot itself went reasonably well, I managed to capture all the required shots. Unfortunately however some of the shots cam out overexposed due to having to manually adjust the exposure for some shots, and forgetting to reset it.

I had some trouble acquiring a drum kit for this shoot, only locating one about an hour before the shoot, the first kit we planned on using was unavailable as, on the day I was told, someone else had it, and I unfortunately couldn't get hold of that person. luckily the bassist of the band had a brother who allowed us to borrow his.




Music Video- editing

Unfortunately during editing I lost my memory stick which contained the premiere pro editing file, luckily I had backups of the actual footage, but had to begin the editing process again.

For this version, I did the initial edit in a program called power director, because I don't have access to premiere pro on my home computer.















This was then exported to be colour graded on premiere pro.


Magazine Advert: Research and Planning

When planning my magazine advert I looked back at the images and ideas I had gathered for the digipack and the music video, I needed to make sure the advert had the same look as the digipack and music video in order to maintain a consistent image for the band.

We had been provided with a number of magazine adverts, I picked out a couple which I felt matched the genre of the band, and also matched the kind of look I am trying to create.




Also within these adverts though were a couple which whilst they didn't quite fit the image I was attempting to create, they included ideas which I thought could work well.

For example, in these two images I liked how they had the singer at the forefront thus conforming to genre conventions, but still pictures the entire band instead of relying on just a single band member(the singer).



From this preliminary research my thoughts were to have the majority of the advert be a photograph of the band. such as with the "The Dirty Youth" example.

Font wise for the magazine advert I chose to use the same font as on my digipack, this would keep a level of consistency across all the products, the same would go for the colours and other aspects of mise-en-scene, such as costume. in order to keep to the product and image I have created for the band.



Thursday 24 November 2011

Digipack- Creating the Product

To create the digipack I used primarily gimp(gnu image manipulation program) and photoshop, I started the design by creating a basic template, this template had the basic structure I wanted and also the kinds of colours I wanted to use. by making sure the panels worked with the template in terms of design it would help in keeping the panels cohesive.







Wednesday 23 November 2011

Digipack - Planning

From my research I saw that rock digipacks often had examples of more traditional media so in my planning I decided to have a smoky or swirling effect to join the panels together and make the piece more cohesive overall.

I also knew that I wanted to incorporate some  of the ideas I had identified for the music video into the digipack, for example the washed out blue colours I was thinking of for the video inspired the main colour scheme for the digipack.



Friday 11 November 2011

Digipack- Research and planning 2

I started by looking over my blog, using the music videos I had looked at, the images I had gathered for my moodboard and the albumcovers/digipack images I had located for my digipack research. this helped me to really cement the ideas I had gethered to create a digipack representative of the band image I was trying to create.

I began by searching for an appropriate font, I knew I wanted something modern, so without seraphs. but it also had to be slightly distressed.

Through a google search I found this site, which I had used before as it has a huge variety of different fonts. after creating a simple image with the fonts I had found I decided that I would use the font Dirt2Stickler.

I felt that it made an acceptable compromise between the distressed look I wanted, whilst also fitting the feel of the song and image for the band I had created up to this point. I had footage of the hill scene from before which I hadn't been able to use on the final film, so I chose to incorporate some of the footage into the imagery in the digipack.

Thursday 10 November 2011

Digipack - research and planning

I started researching into digi packs designs for my chosen genre with a simple google search, I managed to find these images which showed the content which bands of a similar genre used in thier digipaks. these also were similar to the feel of the song and the band which I am already building in relation to the music video, and the images I had already located for my mood board.
North (Ltd.Ed) (Digipak)





Image






I also searched for similar bands on amazon and looked at the designs of their album covers and digipacks, the bands I looked at were sigur ros, mogwai which I had identified through using last fm and also nirvana




This Bread Is Mine (Ltd. Digipak)
Takk


NowhereLift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will


One of the motifs I noticed with rock digipaks, is that the images used contain a spread of traditional art, paintings and drawings and also photographs. so for my digipak I decided to not only include photographs of the band but also to include drawings and traditional art as well.

The Edit

As I had already shot at two of my locations, I started editing the footage I had so far and used a photograph of my location to fill in where the shots on the hill would be.

overall the edit went well, the various ideas for the differing locations worked when they were put together even more so when I applied the colour grading.

Tuesday 1 November 2011

Storyboard

Here are the Scanned in images of my Storyboard.

location 1- the hill scene where the whole band are performing with instruments.


location 2- the bridge with the entire band again but not performing with instruments.



Wednesday 19 October 2011

Record Label Reseach

When creating the ancillary tasks we have to reference a record label, and they have to sign bands of the same genre and style.
My media studies teacher suggested looking into post-rock bands and the labels associated with them, and I also looked into record labels associated with the genre of rock which I had identified.

the first record label I identified was Fat Cat records.
Fat Cat Logo

I got to this record label through the band sigur ros who I had Identified from my research into both music videos and Record labels. However from research into the types of band they often signed, I found the genre of the music was too dissimilar to my own.

Because I thought, though not completely right I was along the correct lines in terms of a record label, I used sigur ros as a band to work from, so I used last fm to find similar bands and from there found different labels.

One of the labels I found was Chemikal Underground, they are a record label which focuses on post-rock/rock bands, I found them through the band mogwai via last fm. Because they were related to the genre of my song, and often signed bands which had a similar style to the one I have chosen.



Friday 14 October 2011

Second Shooting Session

Originally I planned to film on Tuesday 11th, but although I had said to meet in one location two of the band members were waiting elsewhere, and the other member had said they were available but weren't so it was postponed to the next Wednesday.

In the end however postponing the filming was beneficial, I managed to get all the footage recorded and as I was filming it began to rain. Luckily we were filming in continuity so throughout the video, the band members will get progressively wetter, which I felt would give an interesting effect and tie in nicely with the conventions of the genre and themes/feel of the song.




Thursday 13 October 2011

First Shooting Weekend

On the Saturday of the weekend I had my first shooting day, the shooting was of the main performance of the band at my first location, the top of the hill. I set up the bands early in the morning so we could get the shots before the sun was too high in the sky. unfortunately though I had got some footage we had to end the filming prematurely as it started raining.

I would have continued but the band members' had expensive equipment which they understandably didn't want getting wet.

The Sunday however was far more fruitful, I managed to get all of the footage filmed at the new location(location 3) with just the singer of the band.






Location 3

The third and final location for my music video. this is the location for the section of the video with only the main singer. to juxtapose with the two other locations which were quite rural this is in a more urban environment as suggested in the audience feed back I had from my presentation.








Location 2

This is the second location which I will be using, this will be for the scene where the band is gathering without their instruments






Saturday 8 October 2011

Continued research

When researching into record labels I stumbled across the band sigur ros, the style and tone of their music was very similar to that of my track so I begun looking into some of their music videos,

the video for their song Glósóli particularly stood out to me as I thought the locations, lighting, colour grading and all round shot composition up until about 3:50 were very fitting for the genre of this song and my own, also this video reflected the sorts of ideas I had for my video.



Thinking about the new urban part of the music video I found this video by the group mogwai, I liked the use of slow motion here and the sense of isolation the video manages to create.


Audience Feedback

We had to do a presentation on the ideas we have so far for our music videos, the idea was to get audience feedback on our plans for the music video, focusing on the positives, and also finding the potential flaws in the idea.

As I mentioned before, part of my idea was to have the band performing in a studio, however people said that perhaps this wouldn't fit the rest of the video seeing as it was all outdoors. this idea was changed to instead of having another location with the whole band, having just the singer in an urban location.
Also having just the singer in a scene is a common convention seen in rock music videos, even though I've found rock videos tend to focus on the  band as a whole conventionally, there is still a focus on the singer as an individual over the other band members.

Much of the rest of the feedback was positive, the suggestions that were put forward echoing and reinforcing the ideas and themes I'd already begun to build.



Tuesday 4 October 2011

Testing the new Cameras

Last weekend I borrowed one of the new media cameras in order to get to grips with them so that when comes to actually filming the music video, I will have a basic knowledge of how the camera functions.

I took a few pictures and a couple of videos, here's a small collection of some of the better ones. because the cameras we've had before have been quite simple compared to these I focused on learning not only how to use the camera but how to use the more advanced  techniques they allow us to do.
specifically a far easier, and more powerful way of manually focusing and zooming.