Cover Art

When we filmed in Camden we filmed by Camden lock where we found some beautiful lighting under a bridge. We also took pictures here and found that this had real potential to be our cover art considering Bloc Party are known for using locations as their album and single covers. However our filming in Camden was not up to scratch and so in our final music video we hardly had any footage of this location so it might have confused our audience if we had used this cover art as it had no relation to our video. We decided to use an image from our music video which will show the relation between our media products. As well as an image we had to think of an album name to go with the cover art design.

This is the layout our CD album must adhere to. We need four separate images to cover this, one for the front back and two for the inside.

Here is what our two album artworks would look like on a real album. I did this by placing our album images into photoshop, free transforming them and then distorting them to fit size of the CD album. This gave a 3D effect to the album in which we had created.




 

Album Research

The album we came up with was Escape, we felt this was similar to Bloc Party's current albums such as Intimacy. Before constructing our cover art we had to research into current albums to look at conventions so that our CD album looked like a real media product. Some of the conventions we found were that the band or artists names are featured on the front of the album and also an image of the artist or band or fancy album works or pictures.

Here is an example of a front cover from the band the Hoosiers who are part of the indie genre. They use the colour scheme of red and white here and you can clearly see the band and album name, the band use this text on all of their albums as it creates a unified house style and a mode of address that makes them easily identifiable by fans and new audiences. For the cover art they continue to use the red colour scheme and have created a cartoon like design. Having listening to the hoosiers and watched various music videos this type of album fits the personality of the band.

This is the inside of their album it again continues to use the red colour scheme which creates the same house style through and each item compliments the other. If these we to be separated you could tell that they belonged together, which is what we would like to achieve in construction our album. They have included an image of the band on the inside page and used similar images from the front page for an image border. The CD has a plain simple design with the band and album name. The image behind the CD is also simple and consists of a red background.

Finally this is the Hoosiers back page of their album. Again they use the red colour scheme as seen in the other elements of the album. The use a similar design to the front of the album cover with the cartton design around the edge. In the middle they have a song list of the songs included in their album, this is a key convention that all music albums will have. Lastly a bar code is also included and so it is important that we also use this same technique.

Here is a layout design of how we want our album covers to look like. For the front page we will feature a close up image of our artist and place the band name and album name in the top right hand corner. For the back page we will place a similar image but with his eyes closed. We feel this compliments the album as he has his eyes open on the front and eyes closed on the back. The CD cover will simply have the band name on it. The inside page will feature some images of the characters seen in the music video. The album will also have the same colour scheme throughout in order to create the same house style.

Music Adverts

For our axillary task we also needed to research into different music posters as we have to make one our selves to promote the artists album. Looking at different music adverts gave us an insight in how we should create ours.

Rhianna has used a similar colour palate throughout her poster to create a unified house style. At the bottom of the poster there is a banner that promotes the album and also has an image of the album so that is it easily recognizable. This helps to promote her album and help to sell albums which is important for the artist. As well as this she also has a large image of her self on the poster so again people can easily recognize that this is her.

Cold plays poster is in a similar design to their album art work. The use of graffiti is used as their album as so when people see this advert they can link the two together. It has a release date information to allow audiences to know when they can get it or they can pre order it on iTunes. The colour of the advert really stands out and the use of a white outline on the album name is emphasized on the coloured background. It is important for audiences to easily recognise album names and for them to be drawn to it in order to sell albums.
Noah and the whales also use the same image on their album, this helps to link to two platforms together. This poster includes ratings which are a key feature of magazine adverts. The use of ratings acts as a promotional device and will encourage customers to buy the CD. Consumers will buy things that have been highly rated. The style of advert reflects the bands genre for example this is an indie style band and the use of a camera and pale colours reflects this.
This adverts image compliments and amplifys the album name. The audience see the album is called 'lights' and also see a similar image. Again ratings are used here and business icons such as record labels are placed down the bottom of the page. This creates awareness of the artists promoters.

All these posters show the albums name, the artist, a picture of the artist, some of the songs included, reviews and small business icons towards the bottom of the posters. In order for ours to look realistic we have to use the same conventions of a music poster.

Evidence of Editing

Editing our video was a very time consuming process. With our first video we had to render it every time we moved something due to the fact we had an SD camera. An image of rendering can be seen below, when the red line appears over the time line this means you have to render it in order to preview it. Once you click render a box appears with a percentage telling you how long the process will take.

Using the video camera speed up the process of our editing as we did not need to render very much and therefore could focus on other elements of our music video such as transitions and timings which were much more accurate.

When editing the video we had to decrease the volume of the clips that we had filmed in order to hear the back in track.

Here is an usual link showing a video on you tube that taught us how to change the colours of our music video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLyGDlBnDfw

Final Cut

Untitled from Sophie on Vimeo.

What music channel to use?

To distinguish which music channel our video will be featured on I googled sky music channels which gave me a list of their channels.

The music channels which we thought would be appropriate were NME, Q and MTV music. All channels include Indie and Alternative rock songs on their channel which our band is classed under.

This is the logo for NME TV which we would place in the corner of our music video the let audiences know what music station they were watching and where they might find more information about the band.

The NME website has information about Bloc party showing that is would be appropriate to use this music channel for our video.

However when we tried to put this logo onto our music video the white background really stood out and did not look realistic. We tried to cut this out in photo shop however it left the letter distorted.

We looked at Q's music channel but it was quite confusing at to what the music channel was called, as when researching the box was coming up which was mainly used for pop music. Additionally the website did not have Bloc Party under their list of music artists.

We then looked at MTV music where we found a simple logo that looked realistic on our music video.

Here shows that MTV recognise Bloc Party and have various videos and information about the banding making this channel appropriate for showing our music video.

This is a screen grab from our music video including the MTV logo which is consistent throughout the whole video. This means that audiences are aware of what music channel they are watching and they can also visit the website for more information.

Digipack Research

For our digipack we needed to research into the types of albums that bloc party already had and other artists of that genre. Below are some images of some of Bloc Party's album's; as you can see their albums and singles mainly consist of location shots. This was good for us as we had taken some really nice images when we went filming in Camden. In the picture below we have included our on take on an album cover to see how it would fit in.




Here is a larger image of what we created on photoshop. The colours were already vibrant in this location but we wanted them to be even more distinguished so we therefore increased the contrast on photoshop to make the colours stand out even more. This is an image that we feel would be apropriate for our cd cover. We placed the text in a similar way to Bloc Party to create a sense of realism for our audience. Additionally Bloc Party do vary the colour of their texts for example the top right hand picture features blue text whereas the rest feature white. This meant that we could experiment with colour to see what colour was emphasized the most and complimented the background image.




After our change of story line we could no longer use this image for our album cover because we did not use this scene in our final music video. Instead we decided to use an image of our mine character that can be seen in our actual music video however this still links in with Bloc Party's albums as a recent album intimacy uses images of people.

Bloc Party's Album

Our Front Cover Image

The Text

The type face for the album titles creates a coherent house style throughout the cd covers. This means that people link this type of text to the band which makes it more recognizable for their audiences. For us to make our CD look as realistic as possible we also need to use the same text style. This will involve using the standard straight capital text with the full stop at the end and placing the album title or single name directly underneath it.


Using DaFont we were able to look at similar text styles to try and find the one the matched Bloc Party's current text style to make our CD look more realistic to our audiences.

The final font we chose was Code Bold and Code light which we felt best represented Bloc Party's actual type face on their cover albums and posters.

New Shooting Schedule

Tuesday 7th February - Filming to begin on Sidcup highstreet after school at 3.30pm. We plan to find a cafe where we can film from the outside showing our characters enjoying a meal together. This is contrasted when we will film just the male on his own. Head shots to be done of each character, long shots, medium close up and close up shots to be taken against a plain wall.

Update: Completed

Monday 13th - All to meet up at Emily's house at 12.00 to finish our filming. We will shoot some scenes at her house where we will film the male looking into the house where he will be looking at himself and his girlfriend eating dinner. Additionally we will then go into Dartford and film more scenes such the cafe scene again in order to make sure we get the best footage for our final cut. We will locate a bridge in which we can have our male actor looking over looking at himself and his girlfriend walking by again showing that he is looking back at his life. Here we will film all the performance side to our video which will help to promote the artist.

Update: Completed

We spent the whole day filming in Dartford to ensure we got all the footage that we needed for our final video. Doing a performance video we had to change our approach to our video as we needed to be aware of the artist looking at the camera, we made sure we filmed scenes twice to ensure we got the footage that we needed.

After looking at our footage we were still not happy with some of the shots, the natural lighting from our location was very vibrant on screen and made it difficult to see the lip syncing of the artist. With the deadline fast approaching we wrote down which bits we wanting to re film and went out to film so that we had time to edit it in time for our deadline.

Second Filming

After going up to Camden in London and discovering we could not use the footage from there, we replanned our story line and decided to move locations. We decided to choose Dartford, Sidcup and one of our houses. These locations were much more accessible for everyone and meant we go could go back there at ease if needed. Below are some pictures from our second lot of filming, we mainly filmed in Emily's house where we shot the chorus and the opening scenes. We then moved down to Dartford park where we filmed Jake throwing his jacket and one verse of the song. Unfortunatly the footage from Sidcup highstreet was too bleached out and trying to edit the colours did not make a difference and therefore we reshot these images in Dartford where lighting seemed to be better.

slideshow | Viewer

Change of Ideas

 From the feedback that we had received we knew that we had to make some major changes. The whole point of feedback is so that you can change it to satisfy a customers wants and needs. We only had a short amount of time in order to change our rough cut to our final cut and so we did not have time to plan a whole new story board as our original one did take around 2 weeks to produce. We decided that our story did not fit in with the song we had chosen. Although we still wanted to use our characters because we had planned our filming around them we decided to change our story line. Instead of our male character having a stalker we decided to make the male and female boyfriend and girlfriend but sadly they had split up, the video now looks at him looking at his past with his girlfriend and going back to all the places they have visited together. As well as keeping the video a narrative we are also going to make the video a performance video so that we can promote are artist a lot more than we had previously done. A new audience watching this video would not know that our main character was the main artist of Bloc Party and so we decided we needed to make this more clear after looking at our feedback. We had already filmed in Camden for our music video but now we had changed the story line most of this footage could not be used however some of the footage can be used for example where Emily comes closer to Jake as he is standing still, this still creates a sense of mystery and illusion for the audience as its almost as if she is ghost like. The end of the video will show Jake concluding his journey looking back at the past with his girlfriend and will show him walking off alone into the distance. We felt that this was a much better story line and actually fitted in with the lyrics of our song.

For example in the chorus it says 'we were hoping for some romance, all we found was more despair' this portrays that our male was looking for the romance to continue but because they had split up despair was created.

Visuals complimenting the visuals...
Due the large amounts of rendering we had to do every time we edited our music video we decided to change our choice of camera to a hand held video camera. Due to the fact it took so long to edited we did not really have enough time to try out different effects as simply to test one effect took around 5 minutes which was vital editing time. The use of the new camera will allow us to place in more effects such as overlays as it does not requiring rendering as often. Lyrics such as 'if your right hand is causing you pain cut it off, cut it off' we will place an overlay of this happening so that the lyrics and the visuals compliment each other.

New Locations

It was difficult to try to get up to London again seeing as we all lived in different areas and getting trains was sometimes difficult and expensive. We therefore decided to film more locally this way we knew what locations were best and we did not waste time looking for places to film. Our chosen three locations to film were Sidcup, Dartford and one of our houses. Having three different locations creates a variety of shots for the audience watching our video. This should help to prevent audiences thinking our video is too repetitive.

Dartford Highstreet

Sidcup Highstreet

Emilys House

Initial Feedback

After showing the class our rough cut we received some feedback...

This is a picture of our feedback, the general summary was that:
-not enough variety of shots, the song has a lot of chorus and only a few verses and we used the same shots for the chorus, which caused some repetitiveness for our audience.
- story line was not clear and our song did not promote the artist because it was a narrative and not a performance.
-The strobe lights used in our rough cut, although some liked the effects they were not bright enough and so some of the shots were not very clear.
- In our animatic we underestimated how long it would take to film something and so our ending lasted longer than the actual music which needs to be changed.

Looking back at our rough cut we all decided that we needed to make some major changes...

Equiptment List

For our music video we used a number of different equipment in order for us to create scenes we had planned in our animatic.

Camera

This is the camera we used when we filmed up in Camden however this camera took SD memory cards and we found that the memory ran out very quickly so we decided to use our teachers camera which she provided, this camera used a cassette tape which had much more memory on it for us to film a lot more.

This is the second camera we used to do our filming this was much easier to use as we could see what we were filming and did not have to use SD cards which did not have a lot of memory. Using a cassette tape meant we could film at lot more footage at once. This camera was also easier to edit from because in Final Cut Pro when we move our film images we did not have to render it every time.

Iphone

We used my apple Iphone to take pictures of scenery and evidence of filming, we also used a strobe light app to create our chorus.

Memory Cards / Tape

At first we used SD cards to record our music video on but we then switched to a camera tape that could hold more footage. 

We used an Apple Mac to conduct research, blog, edit our film and create our digipak.

Tripod

The tripod allowed us keep the camera still when filming and also allowed us turn the camera whilst keeping it at the same angle this gave the filming that professional edge as the camera was steady.