Editing the animatic

The purpose of our animation slideshow was so that we could get a rough idea of how our actual music video would look when it was all put together. We put together all our images from our story board which we had previously drawn. These pictures were all cropped and edited in photoshop so that they all had a consistent house style. In our group none of us had used final cut before and so before we actually began we decided to have a play around on the programme and get used to all of its controls. Adding images into the programme was easy as all we did was import a folder where all our story board images were. Never using this programme before also meant that we did not know how to edit and after many attempts of trying to put it together on where we thought the scene should change was often at the wrong times. After working out the songs beat we mainly used beats of 8, 4 and 2. This made the animatic much easier to edit and also looked much better. As well as the images we had to import our music track, we did this by uploading the song onto the Apple Mac and ensuring the file was MP3. We could cut and extend images to however we liked and meant we could see which scenes we wanted longer and what scenes were not needed. The creation of this will enable us to look at all our timings and scenes so that we can create a similar peice for our rough cut.
The timings that we had originally planned for did change slightly as the song we had on the computer was slightly different to the one we used on the animatic. In our animatic video we did try to add in slide transitions however this did began to mess up the timings of our music video so we decided to leave these out until the real thing. We hope to add
-Overlays
-Fade in fade in out
-Shaking effect

Here are some picture of the process of editing the animatic, the green bar is the audio and the blue bars are the story board images. I found this process exciting as it brought all of ideas together with our chosen music choice.

Bloc Party

This is the band Bloc Party, it consists of four band members. They are an indie rock band composed of Kele Okereke (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Russell Lissack (lead guitar), Gordon Moakes (bass guitar, synths, backing vocals, glockenspiel), and Matt Tong (drums, backing vocals). Their type of music has been to said to have been drawn from bands such as Radiohead and The Cure. Bloc party was formed in 1999 at reading festival (a popular festival consisting of indie music). The band did not set on the name Bloc Party until 2003.
The band first had their break through when Okereke gave the single 'shes hearing voices' to the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand during a concert, from here the
song was played on Radio 1. The song proved popular and this lead to many more releases of songs. There first song was vital in setting the scene for the type of music genre and target auidence they were aiming for. The indie genre has a huge fan base, and proved popular.

ALBUMS

Bloc Party released their debut album 'Silent Alarms' in Feburary 2005. This album was voted 'album of the year' by NME and reached number 3 in the UK album charts. The band turned out to gain a good reputation and it was dicovered they had positivite reviews from those in the US. Bloc party were now not only a UK band but a global band.

This was Bloc Party's first album cover; as you can see it is simple yet effective. Bloc Party have taken the name of the ablum and portrayed it in the picture. It presents a tranquill setting in a field with the use of whites, grey and black colouring. The band have not used their picture in this cover, this is possibly because the band had only just started out and fans and new audiences may not realise who the band are visually just yet. This however does work in the bands favour as they could put the band name in a large type face in order to stand out on the shelves with the hundreds of other albums. Releasing a first album is always difficult and the sales will decide the success or the failure of a new and upcoming band. This album sold over 1,000,000 copies worldwide.

The bands next album was called 'A Weekend in the City' which was released in February 2007. (2 years after their first album), however this ablum was leaked in November 2006 and so was put on itunes for download so that the band did not lose out on sales. It debuted at number 12 in the Billboard 200, with 48,000 copies sold. This ablum reached number 2 in the UK album charts.

This is the art work for the second ablum released by Bloc Party, again the band do not use images of themselves. Having an image as the second cover begins to set a house style for the band and audiences will now notice that this is a Bloc Party album. The name of the album reflects the image on the cover. This picture is taken from a high angle where you can see the roads that you would usally find in the 'city'. Additionally lighting is key here, they use ambient lighting for example using the street lamps. The lighting on the roads has been cleverely edited to show the break and head lights of a car without actually showing the cars in the picture. The bands name and ablum name has been placed in the top left of the album. It has been coloured in white in order to stand out from the rest of the ablum.

The bands third album was named 'Intimacy' and was released in August 2008 one month after the band released their popular single 'Mercury'.

This album cover again does not feature the band but does have an image of two people about to kiss. This reflects the ablum name as kissing is an intmate thing. The lighting is used effectively here with the faces in a pale colour with a dark background in the space between them. The shadowing here helps to define the facial features of both faces.

In 2009 the band did not have a current recording contract and so were under no obligation to produce any more albums. They did release one more single called 'One More Chance' in August 2009 which almost relfects the state were previously in. After this the band decided to go on 'hiatus' and were unsure if they would continue with the band. However in 2011 the band are currently writing their fourth album with 15 new tracks. There has been speculation whether the band are looking for a new lead singer or not.

Looking at these ablums covers has given inspiration and ideas when we come to make our cd cover for the single 'Flux'.

Planning the story board

Here is an audio clip of Sophie and Emily discussing the next scenes for the music video. Whilst they were doing this me and Voke were drawing the images out ready for them to be pictured, uploaded and edited in final cut.

These are the drawings of our animatic all layed out together. Myself and Voke drew the pictures onto the story boards and helped with planning whilst Emily and Sophie worked out the timings for our video and how long each clip should be. This was extremely useful as when it came to editing the animatic we could look at our timings and then see how long each clip needed to be. Planning a story board was a long proccess especially for a three and a half minute song in which each scene did not last more than ten seconds.

Female Character

This is Emily and she will be playing the part of Jakes Girlfriend. In our orignal media story line we planning to dress Emily in a distinguishable outfit for example a leopard print jacket so that the audience could clearly identify her from other people who may be in shot. When we changed oustory line we decided to dress her in normal clothing so that she fitted into the 'girlfriend' rather than a stalker. This made the story line look more believeable. We believe she has the right quirky dress sense which can be seen in the indie genre.  

Male Character

When planning our video we decided that we needed an male around 18 years of age with an indie look, with this brief we found our man. This is Jake, he is 18 years of age, long hair, tatoos and is a smoker. With this he was perfect for our video and perfect for giving us our indie look. In our original music video Jake needed to portray emotions of confusion and panic at the fact that he is being stalked. When this changed we no longer had to portray this kind of emotion and instead asked Jake to lip sing the whole song and also give off the feeling that he misses his girlfriend. We will dress jake in a zip up hoodie (as drawn in our animatic) and skinny jeans, he has sweeping hair which is a distinc characteristic of the indie genre.

Planning

We recently started to put down final ideas for our music video and began to story board. Using sheets that had four black boxes on we were able to draw pictures of each scene with a brief description of what was happening. In order to do this I had our chosen song on my phone and we listened carefully to what we thought the opening scene should be, after listening a few times we finally decided that we would film our character coming out of the underground at camden.



We drew this on our story board...

As well as this we had to ensure that timings were accurate; when listening to the song we found regular intervals where we felt the scene should change and wrote down how long each scene will last for. This started to put a real picture of what the video would look like.

Whilst planning our story board we decided to change our idea slightly, instead of solely focusing on drugs and delinquent behavious we decided to introduce a female into the video. This female would be a stalker of the male character and would appear frequently in the video to create the stalker effect. We found that this was a good idea and fitted in well with the lyrics which talk about 'romance' and 'despair'.