Thursday, 12 April 2012
Friday, 6 April 2012
Digipak and CD template final
In today's lesson I spent the full time adding the marketing information onto the cd template which is separated from the digipak as we want the examiner to see our design up close as it's hard to make out in the mock up. The first thing I needed to do was write out the artist name and song title and alter the size shape and position of it which took a while till I thought it looked strong enough to be on a cd template, I decided to put the artist name bigger than the single because she is the most important feature as without her no music would have been created so viewers need to see that. The song title was very hard to position because it had to stay in the white due to brand identity you couldn't see it on parts of the template as the image was too bright so the only place you could see it worded clearly was underneath the artist name however now it's a finished product I wouldn't have put it anywhere else. The hardest thing to position was the copyright information as I used the arc tool to arch the writing one way so it would flow around the edge of the c.d however getting the percentage correct was tricky as it fitted on one side but the other was too high so it resulted in me using the transform tool and dragging it around myself until it fit. Finally I added the company logo as that is also part of the brand identity so fans can instantly see who the artist is signed by and if they want to find any extra information about them out, they can look into it further.
Below you can see the finished version of our digipak, because I have posted the last couple of days talking about how we had created it step by step there is not much else for me to discuss only that on Monday's lesson we are going to create a mock up of the digipak to see how it would look if it was sold to our target audience which will then show us as a group if we would of needed to change anything for the better or improve on any elements. But the fact we have used two patterns that exist in our music video throughout shows we have thought logically during the planning stages of our digipak and it's paid off when viewing the final result.
Sunday, 1 April 2012
Advert Editing and Final Piece
After completing the digipak mock up the next task was to create an advert which would promote our album and music video further. The first task I had to complete was choosing the correct image as the first image we were going to use was a landscape format and most adverts are usually portrait so we will use that image for extra promotion.
When finding the image I believed was strongest I removed all blemishes to give her that "super model" look and also added extra eyelashes on top of her bottom set to make them stand out more, I got these from a download from a tutorial I used earlier in the year and are very easy to apply.
The first thing I added onto the advert was the artists name and because I had already created the digipak I knew instantly to use the "Katy Berry" font but because the advert was on a larger scale I got to make the writing slightly larger because there was a lot more space to fill up, however the chosen font wouldn't convert the dollar sign so I chose a different plain font so I could just add the sign in between the KE and the HA so it said her trademark name Ke$ha. Then went onto add the single name and once again I had already produced it on the digipak so it just meant re writing it and using the werewolf font as before so our brand identity was visible. Because of the shadows from the pattern being so bright and the writing being white I had to make the title smaller than on the digipak so it would fit in the darker part of the image and stand out, but being here at least it's clear to read and central next to the character.
After adding the main text it was then time to add in the company logo and the phone bar code which again are two things we used in the digipak so I just copied them over and re sized them slightly to make them look of a professional standard to be included. I put them both on the lower half of the advert where the image had been darkened as all of these elements would look more thought about if they are all kept together.
It was then onto adding other elements that would only look right on the digipak so meant I had to create them from scratch, the first thing was the release date and by writing it using only numbers it saves space but looks like a actual advert as all artist's use numbered dates instead of words as it's easier and simple to create. Because the werewolf font links into the word Cannibal we thought using the Katy Berry font for any other writing would be more suitable as it's clear which is an element we need so that a range of audiences can see our information clearly as the werewolf font could cause some confusion. After adding the release date I then went onto writing 2 reviews which could have been from any magazine/newspaper talking about our single/album and giving their overall views, the first one was from Heat Magazine and I said that they gave us a 5 star rating, the rating system is a good thing to use I believe because the higher the stars the more interested viewers would be so seeing that our album got the highest rating possible would spark up interest and make people think that it must have something special about it. The second one was from Cosmopolition magazine and their opinion was that the album is outstanding so by putting both reviews together (company small underneath to make viewers notice the positive comments) it would definitely be an indication to our target audience that something positive comes with the album.
The final elements I added was some contact info for the artist herself. I included Ke$ha's actual website which contains all of her videos, images of her and news about herself and also her tours so all her fans can keep up to date with any new gossip that's been revealed. Also I added her Facebook page which her fans could like and information about her will be posted onto their along with competitions, personal images and new videos she has taken from her day to day life so they could see exactly what the artist gets up to when she's not performing. I thought that two would be enough as anymore would spoil the presentation and because these both have a link it shows I have thought about which ones to pick as it again links to the brand identity.
Overall I believe the final outcome looks professional and also shows our main character in a positive light, using the leopard print background again links in with the digipak but also the music video as this is our unique selling point (USP) which can be introduced through the brand identity because if we create anything else that could be used as promotional marketing then all of the options need to be considered.
Monday, 12 March 2012
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Friday, 3 February 2012
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
Evaluation Script - Question One
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products
Inspiration from videos
Compare and contrast your video to others, costumes and editing etc
When producing our music video we looked into the genre of pop and r&b and the conventions in which came with it. We found that in a stereotypical female video there was a use of emotions to carry a certain meaning as seen in our video the actress comes across as quite an aggressive frustrated character, it is this use of emotion in which allows us to portray the underlying idea of the actress being fed up of hiding who she is and furthermore linking in the frustration of her being embarrassed of being herself. Another convention was the use of males throughout a video and the negative reflection they tend to give off, we decided in our video to use the males in order to show the female as the dominating sex, we did this by having the actress controlling the males and their every movement as if they were helpless against her, it is here were we can furthermore link in the expression of feelings that the actress has towards male and the idea that she is fed up of them being in control and abusing her so she is getting her revenge. The feminist theory can be found from this as it is showing the diversity of the female actress and how she is standing up to the male and is no longer an inferior sex, which goes against the usual representation of woman in media as the ‘weaker sex’. Appearances in a female r&b video are important as the visuals should match the lyrics but a use of fashionable/explicit clothing is also required, it is here where our video can be directly linked as we focused on the lyrical use in order to block the video, for example in the first verse the lyrics ‘I get so hungry when you say you love me’ are represented by the actress circling the male character and gradually making her posture straight directly in front of him, from this blocking you are able to recognize the actress as an animal and the idea of her being hungry so circling her prey before she attacks. The clothing used throughout contributes a great deal to the video as it represents the actress in her different forms, for example in the second verse we dressed the actress in a leopard print leotard, this allowed us to show her as the animal she was being represented as. When dressing the character in her casual clothing we focused on other r&b/pop singers and the clothing that can be found from that genre, an example of this can be the use of the high waisted shorts as the pop artist pixie lott wears these and the r&b artist nicki minaj, this shows that we have took into consideration what is fashionable in the genre so that it matches our video continuity. The clothing which we chose for the actress was explicit across the chest area, we decided on this as we felt that it was this body feature which caught the males attention the most, it is here that Laura Mulvey can be linked and the theory of the male gaze as the notion of looking is directed towards the females body parts.
Inspiration for our video came from various media products; we focused on videos within the genre but also looked into how certain videos managed to create an uneasy atmosphere. In Rihanna’s disturbia you see the use of jolted head movements, we included this in our music video as it gave the illusion that the actress was not stable or in the correct frame of mind, super imposing of two scenes is also included in both the videos, in Rihanna’s video it is used to represent the singers mind and show her as a trapped individual who cannot get away, we took inspiration from this idea but altered it slightly so that the super imposing in our video was of the male actor running in slow motion and the female laughing, it was here that we gave the illusion the male actor cannot get away from the female and it is almost like a game in which humors her showing furthermore the twisted mind of the actress. Fast pace editing is included throughout Rihanna’s video and our own, Rihannas video uses the editing in order to represent the singer as distorted and unlifelike, however in our video we used the editing when the actress was behind bars in order to shake them vigorously, this allowed the audience to see that the actress in our video is trapped and frustrated and wished to escape. The dance sequence, which is included within our video, has numerous inspirations. Rihanna’s distrubia has the dancers walk into position with jolted body movements, similarly in our video we had the dancers walk into their positions acting weak and distorted as if they had just rose from the dead this allowed the slight genre of horror in which we wanted to include to be found as the idea of people rising from the dead is unnatural, another video which inspired us for the dance routine was Beatfreakz Somebodys watching me, the video contains humor alongside the horror through the use of representing well known singers such as the pussycat dolls in a different way, the pussycorpse trolls, we decided to use this idea but rather than change the actors we used the well known dance routine the Macarena, it is here where the humor can be found as the audience will recognize the dance in the video so it will therefore stand out to them but alongside this in relation to the rest of the video it is quite random so will therefore be an entertaining surprise for them.
Another video in which inspired us was Lady gaga’s paparazzi, throughout her video she uses still images of actors who appear to be dead, this too can be found in our video as we felt that this allowed the horror of the video to really stand out through the idea that the actress has murdered these people and is now showing the audience openly and willingly, this then furthermore links in with the underlying emotion of the video and the idea that the actress is no longer afraid to say this is me and I’m not afraid to show anyone.
The final video that we took inspiration from was Jessi J’s Nobody’s perfect. A tea party scene was shot of the singer having a miserable time whilst the other actors around the table were enjoying themselves, we used the idea of a tea party but altered it so that the actors around the table were the people who she had killed in prior scenes and the actress in our video was the one enjoying herself. This gave the illusion that the actress was playing with dead body’s and again linked in the theme of horror. We felt that by including this scene the audience would see the twisted side to the actress and see that she is not a female to be messed with.
When linking in theorists to our video Carol Vernallis can be brought in through our narrative, editing, camera movements and framing and diegesis. Carol says that in narrative the video is a visual response to the music, this can be seen with the narrative in our video as the footage we created was based around a female attacking the male species like a cannibal, for example when the lyrics 'now I'm gonna eat you fool' are used a clip of the female actress going to attack the male actor is used to demonstrate that she is about to feast upon him. Carol furthermore goes on to say that in the narrative a theme/narrative may be run through the video but in a montage style, again this can be found within our video as we wished to show the underlying stages of what the actress goes through and how she gradually becomes more open with her true self. We did this by beginning with the female actress attacking only one male allowing us to represent that she is just beginning to stand her ground and find her feet, we then continued to use footage including various other male actors in which the actress had attached which allowed us to represent that the actress is beginning to feel confident about her true self, we then further more used a scene in which all the male actors are based around a table and are being controlled by the actress representing that she has come even further and is now not afraid to stand her ground and show who she truly is. When it comes to editing Carol said that editing may match the musical phrase or beat, it is this specific point which can be found continuously throughout our music video as through the strong beats constantly used and also the creepy storyline that comes with the song we felt that this would be most effective as it gives the audience the idea that there is a lot going on and things aren't simple. A further point that Carol said with editing is that it may become foregrounded – the edits may be really obvious, to draw attention to themselves as opposed to invisible, continuity editing, in our music video the editing techniques such as super imposing, fast pace editing and filters stand out clearly in the video this is due to the context of what is going on in the scene and it allows that certain section of footage to stand out for a particular meaning, for example the super imposing is used to show the actress as an insecure person and although the 'evil laugh' is silent we are still able to recognize that there is evil in her giving us an uneasy attitude towards her. We felt that through allowing the editing techniques to stand out more clearly it would be most effective as it allows the audience to understand the comparison between the actress to an animal in her behavioral ways behind bars but also allows them to understand the actress and her emotions more and also allows the video to link more freely into the horror genre. Camera Movements and Framing Carol says that When it comes to shot types, extremes are very common and also The camera may move in time with the music. These two points are contained in our music video however our music video challenges point one. We decided that a variety of different length shots would come across as more professional however we focused on mainly medium shots, medium close ups and meat shots. Although we did use long shots in footage, such as when the male actor is running along a path way to get away from the actress, we found that the more frequent shot in our video was medium close up. This length of shot allowed us to focus on the actress's facial expressions but through the shot being not too close to her face gave the idea of that she does not want her space invading so is keeping a distance. As for the second point of the camera moving in time with the music we used the zoom in and out at various parts within the video in order to create the illusion that the audience is creeping towards the actress but is then frighted away from her, allowing the actress to again have a uneasy attitude and create the idea that she is not safe. We ensured that on each beat of the song the camera was zoomed in and out in time in order to match the music and be of a professional standard. The final concept that Carol talks about is Diegesis and she states that Actions are not necessarily completed – they may be disrupted or interrupted in someway. Our music video contained the genre horror and it is from this that we included scenes of the actress 'attacking males' however we do not directly show the actress attacking them this is cause we had to bare in mind the audience and also the storyline of our piece as if we had included scenes of the actress biting the males it would have become too graphic for people of younger ages and also the underlying storyline of the actress becoming free and not scared to show what she is would be lost amongst the scenes as they would have no true relevance. It is from this that we only hinted the actress was attacking the males and therefore the actions of what she was doing were not completed and the next scene stepped in, for example on the lyrics 'now I'm gunna eat you fool' the actress pulls the male actors head back and leans in as if to bite his neck creating the illusion that she has attacked him but without showing the audience anything.
Inspiration from videos
Compare and contrast your video to others, costumes and editing etc
When producing our music video we looked into the genre of pop and r&b and the conventions in which came with it. We found that in a stereotypical female video there was a use of emotions to carry a certain meaning as seen in our video the actress comes across as quite an aggressive frustrated character, it is this use of emotion in which allows us to portray the underlying idea of the actress being fed up of hiding who she is and furthermore linking in the frustration of her being embarrassed of being herself. Another convention was the use of males throughout a video and the negative reflection they tend to give off, we decided in our video to use the males in order to show the female as the dominating sex, we did this by having the actress controlling the males and their every movement as if they were helpless against her, it is here were we can furthermore link in the expression of feelings that the actress has towards male and the idea that she is fed up of them being in control and abusing her so she is getting her revenge. The feminist theory can be found from this as it is showing the diversity of the female actress and how she is standing up to the male and is no longer an inferior sex, which goes against the usual representation of woman in media as the ‘weaker sex’. Appearances in a female r&b video are important as the visuals should match the lyrics but a use of fashionable/explicit clothing is also required, it is here where our video can be directly linked as we focused on the lyrical use in order to block the video, for example in the first verse the lyrics ‘I get so hungry when you say you love me’ are represented by the actress circling the male character and gradually making her posture straight directly in front of him, from this blocking you are able to recognize the actress as an animal and the idea of her being hungry so circling her prey before she attacks. The clothing used throughout contributes a great deal to the video as it represents the actress in her different forms, for example in the second verse we dressed the actress in a leopard print leotard, this allowed us to show her as the animal she was being represented as. When dressing the character in her casual clothing we focused on other r&b/pop singers and the clothing that can be found from that genre, an example of this can be the use of the high waisted shorts as the pop artist pixie lott wears these and the r&b artist nicki minaj, this shows that we have took into consideration what is fashionable in the genre so that it matches our video continuity. The clothing which we chose for the actress was explicit across the chest area, we decided on this as we felt that it was this body feature which caught the males attention the most, it is here that Laura Mulvey can be linked and the theory of the male gaze as the notion of looking is directed towards the females body parts.
Inspiration for our video came from various media products; we focused on videos within the genre but also looked into how certain videos managed to create an uneasy atmosphere. In Rihanna’s disturbia you see the use of jolted head movements, we included this in our music video as it gave the illusion that the actress was not stable or in the correct frame of mind, super imposing of two scenes is also included in both the videos, in Rihanna’s video it is used to represent the singers mind and show her as a trapped individual who cannot get away, we took inspiration from this idea but altered it slightly so that the super imposing in our video was of the male actor running in slow motion and the female laughing, it was here that we gave the illusion the male actor cannot get away from the female and it is almost like a game in which humors her showing furthermore the twisted mind of the actress. Fast pace editing is included throughout Rihanna’s video and our own, Rihannas video uses the editing in order to represent the singer as distorted and unlifelike, however in our video we used the editing when the actress was behind bars in order to shake them vigorously, this allowed the audience to see that the actress in our video is trapped and frustrated and wished to escape. The dance sequence, which is included within our video, has numerous inspirations. Rihanna’s distrubia has the dancers walk into position with jolted body movements, similarly in our video we had the dancers walk into their positions acting weak and distorted as if they had just rose from the dead this allowed the slight genre of horror in which we wanted to include to be found as the idea of people rising from the dead is unnatural, another video which inspired us for the dance routine was Beatfreakz Somebodys watching me, the video contains humor alongside the horror through the use of representing well known singers such as the pussycat dolls in a different way, the pussycorpse trolls, we decided to use this idea but rather than change the actors we used the well known dance routine the Macarena, it is here where the humor can be found as the audience will recognize the dance in the video so it will therefore stand out to them but alongside this in relation to the rest of the video it is quite random so will therefore be an entertaining surprise for them.
Another video in which inspired us was Lady gaga’s paparazzi, throughout her video she uses still images of actors who appear to be dead, this too can be found in our video as we felt that this allowed the horror of the video to really stand out through the idea that the actress has murdered these people and is now showing the audience openly and willingly, this then furthermore links in with the underlying emotion of the video and the idea that the actress is no longer afraid to say this is me and I’m not afraid to show anyone.
The final video that we took inspiration from was Jessi J’s Nobody’s perfect. A tea party scene was shot of the singer having a miserable time whilst the other actors around the table were enjoying themselves, we used the idea of a tea party but altered it so that the actors around the table were the people who she had killed in prior scenes and the actress in our video was the one enjoying herself. This gave the illusion that the actress was playing with dead body’s and again linked in the theme of horror. We felt that by including this scene the audience would see the twisted side to the actress and see that she is not a female to be messed with.
When linking in theorists to our video Carol Vernallis can be brought in through our narrative, editing, camera movements and framing and diegesis. Carol says that in narrative the video is a visual response to the music, this can be seen with the narrative in our video as the footage we created was based around a female attacking the male species like a cannibal, for example when the lyrics 'now I'm gonna eat you fool' are used a clip of the female actress going to attack the male actor is used to demonstrate that she is about to feast upon him. Carol furthermore goes on to say that in the narrative a theme/narrative may be run through the video but in a montage style, again this can be found within our video as we wished to show the underlying stages of what the actress goes through and how she gradually becomes more open with her true self. We did this by beginning with the female actress attacking only one male allowing us to represent that she is just beginning to stand her ground and find her feet, we then continued to use footage including various other male actors in which the actress had attached which allowed us to represent that the actress is beginning to feel confident about her true self, we then further more used a scene in which all the male actors are based around a table and are being controlled by the actress representing that she has come even further and is now not afraid to stand her ground and show who she truly is. When it comes to editing Carol said that editing may match the musical phrase or beat, it is this specific point which can be found continuously throughout our music video as through the strong beats constantly used and also the creepy storyline that comes with the song we felt that this would be most effective as it gives the audience the idea that there is a lot going on and things aren't simple. A further point that Carol said with editing is that it may become foregrounded – the edits may be really obvious, to draw attention to themselves as opposed to invisible, continuity editing, in our music video the editing techniques such as super imposing, fast pace editing and filters stand out clearly in the video this is due to the context of what is going on in the scene and it allows that certain section of footage to stand out for a particular meaning, for example the super imposing is used to show the actress as an insecure person and although the 'evil laugh' is silent we are still able to recognize that there is evil in her giving us an uneasy attitude towards her. We felt that through allowing the editing techniques to stand out more clearly it would be most effective as it allows the audience to understand the comparison between the actress to an animal in her behavioral ways behind bars but also allows them to understand the actress and her emotions more and also allows the video to link more freely into the horror genre. Camera Movements and Framing Carol says that When it comes to shot types, extremes are very common and also The camera may move in time with the music. These two points are contained in our music video however our music video challenges point one. We decided that a variety of different length shots would come across as more professional however we focused on mainly medium shots, medium close ups and meat shots. Although we did use long shots in footage, such as when the male actor is running along a path way to get away from the actress, we found that the more frequent shot in our video was medium close up. This length of shot allowed us to focus on the actress's facial expressions but through the shot being not too close to her face gave the idea of that she does not want her space invading so is keeping a distance. As for the second point of the camera moving in time with the music we used the zoom in and out at various parts within the video in order to create the illusion that the audience is creeping towards the actress but is then frighted away from her, allowing the actress to again have a uneasy attitude and create the idea that she is not safe. We ensured that on each beat of the song the camera was zoomed in and out in time in order to match the music and be of a professional standard. The final concept that Carol talks about is Diegesis and she states that Actions are not necessarily completed – they may be disrupted or interrupted in someway. Our music video contained the genre horror and it is from this that we included scenes of the actress 'attacking males' however we do not directly show the actress attacking them this is cause we had to bare in mind the audience and also the storyline of our piece as if we had included scenes of the actress biting the males it would have become too graphic for people of younger ages and also the underlying storyline of the actress becoming free and not scared to show what she is would be lost amongst the scenes as they would have no true relevance. It is from this that we only hinted the actress was attacking the males and therefore the actions of what she was doing were not completed and the next scene stepped in, for example on the lyrics 'now I'm gunna eat you fool' the actress pulls the male actors head back and leans in as if to bite his neck creating the illusion that she has attacked him but without showing the audience anything.
Sunday, 15 January 2012
Evaluation Script - Question Three
Q3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
After creating our final draft for the music video we needed to collect a variety of feedback styles from a range of different people (some including our target audience) via social networking sites but also word of mouth. I was surprised at the high percentage of positive comments we received back because as a group there are parts of the video that we would re shoot and change if we had time, so because no one picked up on the smaller scenes that could have let us down it shows that they are not as problematic as assumed. The reason we decided to use the selection of social networking sites is because they have such a large amount of the population accessing them everyday and we thought that instead of just asking close friends to give opinions, opening it up for the general public to leave comments meant we would get truthful and reliable answers from different age ranges and also different genders, this shows we are not being biast by just collecting results from people we know who could only give us successful points because we know them, as a group we were open to any feedback (positive or negative) as it made us think about how things could be changed in the future if we had chance to re do this piece of coursework but also realistically how other people see our video, because some of the feedback we may agree with to an extent but the negative feedback we don’t understand can be used as a useful resource for us to give our own personal evaluation about. Using the Stuart Hall theory to help me comment on each individual feedback comment we received using media conventions and language will show that I have tried to express this specific evaluation analysis at the highest level and as well as using my own personal analysis I hope it’s put into a high grade boundary.
The first comment we received was from YouTube, the reason we posted our video onto this program is because we believed that anyone could view it and make their honest suggestions about the video as a whole. The first comment was from a male who said, “Pros – Lip syncing is good, mise en scene is also very good keeps the audience interested. Good use of props and costumes”
“Cons – One of the main scenes goes on for quite awhile (man running)” I agree with the fact that the lip syncing was successful as when filming each scene we took a copy of the track for our main character to mime with to make sure when editing every part would be in time. It shows that we kept the audience interested, which relates to the Goodwin theory as we created a different narrative with each of the outfits for example the tea party scene the main character looks very classy however the scene where she is positioned behind the metal bars she looks very casual and also quite rugged due to the holes in the clothes. The reason we created a large amount of scenes is because we wanted to show the audience how her personality changes through different characters and locations and it seemed to interest quite a lot of people we found through the positive feedback we also changed her outfits often to appeal to the male gaze theory and this is definitely a point that has been successful as many people have commented on her being exposed, however it was intentional. The con that he gave us is an element where I can see where he is coming from because when watching the video although there are a lot of cuts of him running up and down the long path it does keep running for some time however because we ran out of time filming the rest of the video we didn’t have any other clips to replace it with, however this criticism is useful as it links to some of my negative outlooks on the video.
The next comment was from a female who also commented through YouTube and because she is a current media student we believed she would pick up on what idea we were going with through the video. Her comment was “Very good lasses, looks very professional. Good job playing the part Emily!” although it’s a short comment it’s positive and I really appreciate the professional part because it means by using existing media conventions and following plans from our research we have created a similar type of video. I believe the main elements that relate to why it looks so professional is how confident our main character was as she took on the personality and cannibal type of character we wanted her portray perfectly but also the variety of shots we captured and the thought beats we have encountered which included a shot cut on each fast beat, this would make it more interesting to watch and could have been a point she was regarding too when she said professional.
The next piece of feedback was from a male who I didn’t know, whereas I knew the other two people who give us feedback I still wouldn’t class them as close friends so they are still being truthful without us influencing their judgements, however this unknown male said “This is pretty well done, good job! Great editing” our editing skills are being talked about once again here, although the previous comment only said “professional” the only reason it was seen in that light was due to the amount of editing we did to our video. When it came down to editing each clip we knew we wanted to make the layout exciting to keep the viewers interested and filters from the editing program brought out the technical side to me especially the superimposing part as I learnt how to lower and increase the opacity over one clip to make the level equal for the reveal of both clips through the first verse. Giving compliments like good job! and well done make me feel really proud that I have achieved such a strong final outcome and people appreciate the work that I have put in.
This comment is from a fellow media student who is in the year below us but personally sent me a direct message letting me know how good the video was so I asked her to leave her own comment on the video so we could use it as another use of feedback, to make it easier for her I also told her to post it on the YouTube account as Emily had only added a number of people to our Facebook page so she wouldn’t have been able to access that. Her comment was “This is such a good video! I really like the effort put into the costumes and the variety of different camera shots and angles. I like the speeded up parts that you have edited in too!” Overall I think this is another positive piece of feedback and she was one of the only people to pick up on the camera angles and shots, when filming the different scenes for this we made sure we took a couple of takes to the side of the characters in front of the characters, behind the characters, up close just to make sure we had alot of footage to work with when putting it all together just so the same angle of one clip was played continuously as attention would be lost. The reason we added the speeded up parts of the main character doing jolter head movements and weird body positions was to reflect on her “cannibalism” as she was hiding behind a normal teenage girl’s body and meant she couldn’t be the person she really hoped to be and through the video you can see how the anger builds up right until she lets go and “transforms” in the tea party scene, but adding a high level of speed to some clips would make the audience look again and again.
This feedback comment came from someone with the name Instant Win which meant it’s hard to determine which sex they are from, but that’s the interesting thing about feedback you don’t know who is going to comment. However they said the following “I liked the effects used when editing especially the superimposing, the lip syncing looks professional and the shots are cut to the beat of the music” The reason we added a superimposed part to our video is the fact that the main character wanted to eat the male character and he was running away from her down a long path but we slowed the running speed down so we could put a clip of her laughing at the entrance of the path so viewers may think she has already caught him and this fades in and out so you can see both characters clearly, however the chorus kicks in and you see him moving at normal speed the technique was used for editing purposes. I talked about the lip syncing previously as our character is a performing arts student she knows her rhythms and sense of beats through a song so she timed exactly when to come in, this was also important when cutting the clips to the beats as it meant fast paced editing hence the reason why we did lots of takes in one location because we knew most of them would get used at least once. Again a positive comment but what I have found out when analysing most of this feedback is it’s all very similar and about the same topics; Editing, Lip Sync and Mise En Scene.
We then went onto posting the video on Facebook in a private group and we received 3 different comments. Because the group was set to private it meant that we only added a certain number of people so chances are we would know them however we wanted the truth so we had something to work with. The first comment read “I like the way that different editing techniques have been used for example when you speed parts up”
The second read “Lip – Syncing is all on time so it looks professional. Some good transitions between shots like the fade one including the slow motion laugh. It’s an interesting video; it wouldn’t get boring after a few watches. Also it’s really scary, I like that.”
Finally the last comment read “I like the use of the fast paced editing and how it gives the video a greater effect overall, also how you used real life locations so that it is more realistic, however there are a few shaky hand movements ( but I didn’t think that was important because the video is so good!)”
The reason I have just quoted all of these comments rather than write about each one of them individually is because they all have similar meanings and I think each point can be spoken about as a whole. Editing is talked about alot they all seem to appreciate the speeded up parts which is good to know as there parts of the storyline which hopefully they have considered why we added them in because as well as entertaining viewers we want each of them to understand the storyline we have created. The fact someone commented on the fact that it wouldn’t get boring after a while brings in again Goodwin’s theory about keeping people interested at all times because I believe when watching it more and more the actual story unfolds. Although I am grateful for all the positive feedback getting criticism is more interesting as I get to give my own feedback on it. One person said the camera movements where shaky at times and this is a point that I 100% agree with and if we could go back and re shoot some scenes I would because it’s distracting but also lacks the professional quality of an actual music video.
I went onto ask people to comment on what they believe the storyline is behind our music video and exactly what they see when they are watching it. The reason I did this was to get more detailed explanations but also to link each of the comments I receive to the Stuart Hall theory. The first comment I received was via Facebook; “I believe that Emily has physiological issues throughout the video and she likes to eat people” this male does have some of the correct perceptions of the video as we wanted the audience to notice a change in her personality from looking and acting like a young girl to bringing out her vicious side and attacking the male characters and I think the reason he has mention physiological is because she is going mad through the video as she just wants to be a cannibal and doesn’t want to hide her identity any longer and she does transform in one of the end scenes, however the fact she likes eating people could be known just by the song title so I think that most people would notice that, linking this comment back to the Stuart Hall theory I think this comment links to the storyline to an extent which in he’s theory is called “Negotiated” Where the audience accepts, rejects, or refines elements of the text in light of previously held views, example neither agreeing or disagreeing with the political speech or being disinterested. The reason I believe this point is true is because he touches on her issues but doesn’t explain what about and how she confronts them, our aim is to make each viewer come up with a storyline and hope it’s the one that we created.
The second comment was given by a fellow media student who we believed would have the ability to use media terminology to a high standard. We again asked him what he thought the storyline behind the music video was he said, "I really enjoyed this piece of work as you can clearly see the storyline is about a young, attractive female who goes around eating boys. This shows you in the lyrics "i eat boys up" Lip syncing is consistent throughout the full music video. I really liked the effects used when editing, especially the superimposing. Overall I find the full video looks highly professional and very entertaining :)". The storyline that he believes to be true is that our main character likes to eat boys, also referring to her as being "attractive" means he has picked up on the "male gaze" theory which shows her wearing revealing outfits to attract the attention of male viewers. He believes that we have illustrated a link between the clips in our video and the lyrics in the song. The reason for this is because we wanted to make sure our music video was keeping in with the media conventions linked to a usual Ke$ha videos e.g revealing costumes, outrageous personality and confident about the characters she is playing which are some of the elements included in our own video. Linking this into the stuart hall theory it shows that the male got our "preferred" storyline of the video, which meant he interpreted it in the correct way.
Below is a chart/graph showing how many people have watched our video and what programs they have accessed it by.
You can see the graph at the top of the image with letters which are shown underneath and explain exactly what each of them stands for. I believe this is a useful way to look deeper into where the feedback has come from and when I go onto presenting this specific question I will go into more detail about how many people used the different programs and also analyse the graph to try and estimate the age range for each separate “letter” and also in the bottom corner you can also see where in the world our video is being watched the most and least, this will also be an element I can look deeper into when presenting this question in greater detail.
Overall the comments we received from the feedback have all been positive and any other points where constructive criticism and nothing to harsh, the reason I believe that is because most of the people watching have only picked up on the negative parts that we also agree with so we haven’t been offended or annoyed as we would change each of them parts ourselves with extra time. Now I just need to think exactly how I am going to present this question it’s either going to be through a video where I will talk about each comment in detail why it is shown behind me through the green screen along with our video to link to each comment as this might mean I add elements in that I maybe didn’t think about when writing this, or my other option is to create a prezi and talk about the comments in detail and what my overall opinion is on each of them, clips can be shown on this too but I just need to think about whether the prezi would be entertaining enough for the audiences to look at.
After creating our final draft for the music video we needed to collect a variety of feedback styles from a range of different people (some including our target audience) via social networking sites but also word of mouth. I was surprised at the high percentage of positive comments we received back because as a group there are parts of the video that we would re shoot and change if we had time, so because no one picked up on the smaller scenes that could have let us down it shows that they are not as problematic as assumed. The reason we decided to use the selection of social networking sites is because they have such a large amount of the population accessing them everyday and we thought that instead of just asking close friends to give opinions, opening it up for the general public to leave comments meant we would get truthful and reliable answers from different age ranges and also different genders, this shows we are not being biast by just collecting results from people we know who could only give us successful points because we know them, as a group we were open to any feedback (positive or negative) as it made us think about how things could be changed in the future if we had chance to re do this piece of coursework but also realistically how other people see our video, because some of the feedback we may agree with to an extent but the negative feedback we don’t understand can be used as a useful resource for us to give our own personal evaluation about. Using the Stuart Hall theory to help me comment on each individual feedback comment we received using media conventions and language will show that I have tried to express this specific evaluation analysis at the highest level and as well as using my own personal analysis I hope it’s put into a high grade boundary.
The first comment we received was from YouTube, the reason we posted our video onto this program is because we believed that anyone could view it and make their honest suggestions about the video as a whole. The first comment was from a male who said, “Pros – Lip syncing is good, mise en scene is also very good keeps the audience interested. Good use of props and costumes”
“Cons – One of the main scenes goes on for quite awhile (man running)” I agree with the fact that the lip syncing was successful as when filming each scene we took a copy of the track for our main character to mime with to make sure when editing every part would be in time. It shows that we kept the audience interested, which relates to the Goodwin theory as we created a different narrative with each of the outfits for example the tea party scene the main character looks very classy however the scene where she is positioned behind the metal bars she looks very casual and also quite rugged due to the holes in the clothes. The reason we created a large amount of scenes is because we wanted to show the audience how her personality changes through different characters and locations and it seemed to interest quite a lot of people we found through the positive feedback we also changed her outfits often to appeal to the male gaze theory and this is definitely a point that has been successful as many people have commented on her being exposed, however it was intentional. The con that he gave us is an element where I can see where he is coming from because when watching the video although there are a lot of cuts of him running up and down the long path it does keep running for some time however because we ran out of time filming the rest of the video we didn’t have any other clips to replace it with, however this criticism is useful as it links to some of my negative outlooks on the video.
The next comment was from a female who also commented through YouTube and because she is a current media student we believed she would pick up on what idea we were going with through the video. Her comment was “Very good lasses, looks very professional. Good job playing the part Emily!” although it’s a short comment it’s positive and I really appreciate the professional part because it means by using existing media conventions and following plans from our research we have created a similar type of video. I believe the main elements that relate to why it looks so professional is how confident our main character was as she took on the personality and cannibal type of character we wanted her portray perfectly but also the variety of shots we captured and the thought beats we have encountered which included a shot cut on each fast beat, this would make it more interesting to watch and could have been a point she was regarding too when she said professional.
The next piece of feedback was from a male who I didn’t know, whereas I knew the other two people who give us feedback I still wouldn’t class them as close friends so they are still being truthful without us influencing their judgements, however this unknown male said “This is pretty well done, good job! Great editing” our editing skills are being talked about once again here, although the previous comment only said “professional” the only reason it was seen in that light was due to the amount of editing we did to our video. When it came down to editing each clip we knew we wanted to make the layout exciting to keep the viewers interested and filters from the editing program brought out the technical side to me especially the superimposing part as I learnt how to lower and increase the opacity over one clip to make the level equal for the reveal of both clips through the first verse. Giving compliments like good job! and well done make me feel really proud that I have achieved such a strong final outcome and people appreciate the work that I have put in.
This comment is from a fellow media student who is in the year below us but personally sent me a direct message letting me know how good the video was so I asked her to leave her own comment on the video so we could use it as another use of feedback, to make it easier for her I also told her to post it on the YouTube account as Emily had only added a number of people to our Facebook page so she wouldn’t have been able to access that. Her comment was “This is such a good video! I really like the effort put into the costumes and the variety of different camera shots and angles. I like the speeded up parts that you have edited in too!” Overall I think this is another positive piece of feedback and she was one of the only people to pick up on the camera angles and shots, when filming the different scenes for this we made sure we took a couple of takes to the side of the characters in front of the characters, behind the characters, up close just to make sure we had alot of footage to work with when putting it all together just so the same angle of one clip was played continuously as attention would be lost. The reason we added the speeded up parts of the main character doing jolter head movements and weird body positions was to reflect on her “cannibalism” as she was hiding behind a normal teenage girl’s body and meant she couldn’t be the person she really hoped to be and through the video you can see how the anger builds up right until she lets go and “transforms” in the tea party scene, but adding a high level of speed to some clips would make the audience look again and again.
This feedback comment came from someone with the name Instant Win which meant it’s hard to determine which sex they are from, but that’s the interesting thing about feedback you don’t know who is going to comment. However they said the following “I liked the effects used when editing especially the superimposing, the lip syncing looks professional and the shots are cut to the beat of the music” The reason we added a superimposed part to our video is the fact that the main character wanted to eat the male character and he was running away from her down a long path but we slowed the running speed down so we could put a clip of her laughing at the entrance of the path so viewers may think she has already caught him and this fades in and out so you can see both characters clearly, however the chorus kicks in and you see him moving at normal speed the technique was used for editing purposes. I talked about the lip syncing previously as our character is a performing arts student she knows her rhythms and sense of beats through a song so she timed exactly when to come in, this was also important when cutting the clips to the beats as it meant fast paced editing hence the reason why we did lots of takes in one location because we knew most of them would get used at least once. Again a positive comment but what I have found out when analysing most of this feedback is it’s all very similar and about the same topics; Editing, Lip Sync and Mise En Scene.
We then went onto posting the video on Facebook in a private group and we received 3 different comments. Because the group was set to private it meant that we only added a certain number of people so chances are we would know them however we wanted the truth so we had something to work with. The first comment read “I like the way that different editing techniques have been used for example when you speed parts up”
The second read “Lip – Syncing is all on time so it looks professional. Some good transitions between shots like the fade one including the slow motion laugh. It’s an interesting video; it wouldn’t get boring after a few watches. Also it’s really scary, I like that.”
Finally the last comment read “I like the use of the fast paced editing and how it gives the video a greater effect overall, also how you used real life locations so that it is more realistic, however there are a few shaky hand movements ( but I didn’t think that was important because the video is so good!)”
The reason I have just quoted all of these comments rather than write about each one of them individually is because they all have similar meanings and I think each point can be spoken about as a whole. Editing is talked about alot they all seem to appreciate the speeded up parts which is good to know as there parts of the storyline which hopefully they have considered why we added them in because as well as entertaining viewers we want each of them to understand the storyline we have created. The fact someone commented on the fact that it wouldn’t get boring after a while brings in again Goodwin’s theory about keeping people interested at all times because I believe when watching it more and more the actual story unfolds. Although I am grateful for all the positive feedback getting criticism is more interesting as I get to give my own feedback on it. One person said the camera movements where shaky at times and this is a point that I 100% agree with and if we could go back and re shoot some scenes I would because it’s distracting but also lacks the professional quality of an actual music video.
I went onto ask people to comment on what they believe the storyline is behind our music video and exactly what they see when they are watching it. The reason I did this was to get more detailed explanations but also to link each of the comments I receive to the Stuart Hall theory. The first comment I received was via Facebook; “I believe that Emily has physiological issues throughout the video and she likes to eat people” this male does have some of the correct perceptions of the video as we wanted the audience to notice a change in her personality from looking and acting like a young girl to bringing out her vicious side and attacking the male characters and I think the reason he has mention physiological is because she is going mad through the video as she just wants to be a cannibal and doesn’t want to hide her identity any longer and she does transform in one of the end scenes, however the fact she likes eating people could be known just by the song title so I think that most people would notice that, linking this comment back to the Stuart Hall theory I think this comment links to the storyline to an extent which in he’s theory is called “Negotiated” Where the audience accepts, rejects, or refines elements of the text in light of previously held views, example neither agreeing or disagreeing with the political speech or being disinterested. The reason I believe this point is true is because he touches on her issues but doesn’t explain what about and how she confronts them, our aim is to make each viewer come up with a storyline and hope it’s the one that we created.
The second comment was given by a fellow media student who we believed would have the ability to use media terminology to a high standard. We again asked him what he thought the storyline behind the music video was he said, "I really enjoyed this piece of work as you can clearly see the storyline is about a young, attractive female who goes around eating boys. This shows you in the lyrics "i eat boys up" Lip syncing is consistent throughout the full music video. I really liked the effects used when editing, especially the superimposing. Overall I find the full video looks highly professional and very entertaining :)". The storyline that he believes to be true is that our main character likes to eat boys, also referring to her as being "attractive" means he has picked up on the "male gaze" theory which shows her wearing revealing outfits to attract the attention of male viewers. He believes that we have illustrated a link between the clips in our video and the lyrics in the song. The reason for this is because we wanted to make sure our music video was keeping in with the media conventions linked to a usual Ke$ha videos e.g revealing costumes, outrageous personality and confident about the characters she is playing which are some of the elements included in our own video. Linking this into the stuart hall theory it shows that the male got our "preferred" storyline of the video, which meant he interpreted it in the correct way.
Below is a chart/graph showing how many people have watched our video and what programs they have accessed it by.
You can see the graph at the top of the image with letters which are shown underneath and explain exactly what each of them stands for. I believe this is a useful way to look deeper into where the feedback has come from and when I go onto presenting this specific question I will go into more detail about how many people used the different programs and also analyse the graph to try and estimate the age range for each separate “letter” and also in the bottom corner you can also see where in the world our video is being watched the most and least, this will also be an element I can look deeper into when presenting this question in greater detail.
Friday, 13 January 2012
Evaluation Script - Question Four
Q4)
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The planning and research stages of our project were very in depth and we used a range of different "media technologies" to collect the information and resources we needed. Firstly we needed to look at existing music videos that fell into our chosen genre (pop and R&B), the reason we chose this specific genre is because we wanted our video to be fun and up tempo, these are some of the words I would personally use to describe the genre, as being a pop and R&B fan myself I have encountered a variety of videos and songs. We used YouTube to search for certain songs we believed where a part of that specific genre and watched the whole clip before collecting the embed code and inserting the video link onto our blogs, each of us then analysed 2 videos and linked them to media conventions. Collecting the embed code was simple as it was available just underneath the video link and was transferred quickly and easily and because YouTube is a world renowned website we knew it was highly unlikely that viruses could be caused.
After completing that task we went onto analyse both digipak and advert examples, again from pop and R&B artists, this would help us with our future tasks of creating our own digipak and advert as we could get tips and be able to notice clearly the elements used throughout each. For example; artists name, song title, an image of some sort, record label e.t.c. To collect these images we used simply Google Images and it came up with a range of different ones for us to choose from so meant it wasn’t hard for us to separately analyse 2 each, the images were of a average size so the examiner can look at it clearly and notice each aspect we have talked about but also Google allows you to save the images free of charge, which was useful for us as the process of saving the image and adding it to our blogs to analyse was completed very quickly. However a downfall to this program was that some of the images had no relevance to our genre and meant we did have to take a lot of lesson time to search for specific digipak and adverts that would link to our work.
When it came to filling in things like; the treatment sheet and call sheets for each destination and risk assessment, we simply used Microsoft Word as it meant the work was presented in a more professional manner compared to hand written and was another use of media program to show on our blogs. When it came to filling out the call sheet our subject tutors gave us mock ups of what to fill in for each destination, however the treatment sheet and risk assessment was all our own doing, from scratch we added all the information which meant it was easier for us to understand and put into our own words but also if any spelling errors should occur then this would show up on Microsoft Word and give us suggestions of what we might have meant, this small element could result in our work being of a higher level so it’s critical that we do check our spelling and grammar. After writing up our answers we copied the documents across to our blogs.
The final technology we used through the research and planning stage was the Sony Hard Drive Camera, in which we used to film our audience research, it’s a small hand held camera and very easy to work with, the only settings we used when collecting our research was the play and stop buttons; play when we were recording a person’s answers to the question and stop when they had finished and we then moved onto another student before the same process was put into place again. In previous lessons I have had problems with the camera’s running out of battery after a certain time; however this one was fully charged and lasted the duration of our recordings. When finished we simply used a wire to attach the camera to the MAC before selecting the file and copying it into I Movie which is the program that allowed us to select the best clips and put them into place in sync, this is a more simple program to use compared to Final Cut (which we used for our music video) as it has less settings to concentrate on, but overall throughout the duration of our research and planning a variety of technologies where used and all at the highest ability to show off each group members skills.
When we had completed the research and planning section of our blog, we then moved onto the construction of the music video. This included posts from discussions in the group to how we had put adverts and digipak together and the final version of the music video. The equipment in which we used to film our music video consisted of a Sony Hard Drive camera; this allowed us to create a variety of different shots through the cameras features such as zooming in to create meat shots. For some scenes we connected the camera to a tripod to allow smooth and steady camera movements for example the use of whip pan in our frantic running scene. However a downfall that came with the camera was its lack of battery charge as when filming some scenes the camera's battery descended rapidly. Also for the beginning scenes we filmed the tripod was of an unsteady quality and this did interfere with our clips which we reported back to our subject tutor with so she could bare it in mind when it came to viewing these clips in our video.
When it came to uploading our footage we used I movie in order to change each of the clips to a .mov format so the quality would be at its highest and at a more professional standard, then opened each of the clips into Final Cut where we could watch them in full and decide which would be successful enough to be included in the actual music video itself, due to the extreme quality of this program it meant we could cut back to specific parts of the video and separate them from others if it meant making the whole video look rushed and unedited. This is also the program we used to add on various effects to our clips; the jerky screen movement of our main character during the couch scene, we added this effect because we thought that the scene looked slightly boring compared to the rest of the video and by adding the effect to each separate clip it made each one of them more eye catching and interesting to look at.
It had elements which included a razor, where you could cut off a small part of the clip that we may not have wanted to use due to “camera faults” or “focus of the characters” e.t.c this was a process that took a small amount of time, it was the rendering of the large clips that took the longest, especially when we added effects on top of the clips, Final Cut had to select the clip and change it to the new version but because of the large files we were compressing it sometimes meant half the lesson was taken up by just rendering, so for next time we know to cut down our clips into sections.
An element that our group especially found useful was the fact we could speed up the clips to as fast as we wanted, we also had the option to change the clip to backwards these both came into use because the whole video is about making her look disjointed and mental and by changing these small things the small clip can look completely different. We added these two effects on a group of clips towards the end of the video, they all made a montage and linked into together well.
The final main point that Final Cut has compared to any other program is the amount of space you can use to edit clips, we made around 5 layers of different clips so they didn’t get mixed up, but you have the option to keep adding layers when needed but also locking the layers so none of the clips involved can’t move when we were focusing on a specific one, because as we found out if you don’t lock each layer and you make changes to one it moves the rest of the clips out of place.
After fully completing our music video each of the posts that came with it were basically just updating our blogs so all written work was done on there, apart from the rough cuts which needed to be compressed into Quick Time before being added to You Tube, we then took the embed code and updated them to our blog. We created 3 of these and it showed how each time we had changed the video to make it better.
Then it went onto the ancillary tasks (Digipak and Advert), these were both completed in Photoshop, However we used a Nikon camera to capture the photo shoot we put together especially for these two projects. When finished we selected the best few images and added them to Photoshop, because we had used a leopard print reflection not much editing needed to be done to the images themselves, except from a slight amount of contrast to increase the amount of emphasis on the print, it was just the marketing points we needed to include. For example on the digipak; the artists name, song title, list of songs, copyright information, bar code and company logo. As for the digipak; artist’s name, song title, phone scanner, release date, company logo, opinions from magazines and websites. All of these elements where added using the text tool on Photoshop we just downloaded the fonts separately from a internet font website and added them into the font selection for us to choose (Werewolf and Katy Berry), The barcode and phone scanner were both copied from Google images and transferred in as a new layer and our company logo was created in a new tab and then also transferred. The process of adding everything in didn’t take long it was more positioning each of the layers that was fiddly especially on the digipak.
Overall Photoshop was a successful program to use as I believe it had all the appropriate settings we needed to create the digipak and advert in a professional way. However some groups may have struggled to use it because it is slightly complicated, but because I am a photography student I do understand most things. Both files needed to be changed to a jpg before adding them to our blogs for analysis.
Finally we had to create evaluations to go along with our video; there were 4 separate questions which we devised out into the group equally. We decided to try and create each question using a different technology to show the examiner how diverse we are. However the options where very limited, we had the choice of a Prezi, creating our own video, Power point or we came up with our own plan for this question by writing it on Microsoft word then creating either recordings using Screenr of me showing how to use each program or just collecting screen grabs. For question 1 we decided to create a video because it’s the longest and most detailed question and would take less time talking about it and adding in other elements rather than write everything down. For this we used the media studio which is available through college to film our video because it has a green screen which we transferred our video onto as it played in the background as we talked so that viewers would have something to look at and the video was more entertaining rather than us sat in the classroom talking into the camera. There was also a range of lights available and we had the use of the ICT assistant to work all the controls and add our video to the green screen, but also add our writing onto the auto queue and control the speed e.t.c to a level that we could all read comfortably, without he’s help we wouldn’t have completed the video in the lesson time as we would of had to work everything ourselves so it was a great help. After filming all of the parts, the ICT assistant transferred each of the files onto my art drive so I could access them instantly in the classroom to start editing the video together. We again used Final Cut to put the video together, as well as including our filming from the studio we over lapped our voices with clips from our music video that linked in to what we were talking about but also downloaded videos via YouTube and Zamzar where you add the web address and convert to mov and the file gets sent to your hotmail account, these videos were the ones we were influenced by and also used clips from them to compare with our own. The same rules applied for Final Cut as above.
When evaluating questions 2& 3 we decided to use Prezi and I did one and Sophie completed the other. Prezi is an online power point website in which you can add loads of sections of writing and images and then make a path which links them all together before showing it finally in a power point. It’s a very easy program to use as you can change the fonts to what suits you and also the background and font colours using theme wizard (which I kept in with our brand identity – purple and the font – white) you also write whatever amount you need and then alter the size of how the font is shown on screen, you can also rotate it so it’s more interesting to look at. However because my question was so detailed I kept my writing all straight on and tried to separate some of the writing to ensure it was understandable for all. The only bad thing about prezi is that it has no spell checker, so this was very time consuming for me to go through everything I had written to check for mistakes, it would have been so much easier if it changed them automatically.
Finally this is evaluation question 4 which I have completed on Microsoft Word because it’s slightly like bringing everything together, so I thought it would be way too long to include in a video and too much to write about in a prezi, so this is the next most professional way to go around presenting it. It is also a program which checks spelling so has saved me a lot of time, however just presenting the question like this would be seen as “boring” compared to the way we have presented the other 3 questions in the evaluation section. So after completing the written part I am either going to record step by step tutorials using the Screenr program on the internet in which you record yourself talking through exactly what you are doing on screen, for example I could be adding text to Photoshop, as well as showing them where you add text I will also be talking through it. However with only one lesson left to complete the evaluations I may have to resort to something less adventurous, screen grabs of me completing certain tasks, both will be easy to understand just the Screenr might be more interesting to watch.
Overall I think using a lot of different technologies through this coursework module has give me lots of confidence to try new things but also made me passionate about creating each piece of my work to the highest standard I can because I have the resources to do it, I just need the motivation and I hope throughout everything I have done it’s clearly shown.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The planning and research stages of our project were very in depth and we used a range of different "media technologies" to collect the information and resources we needed. Firstly we needed to look at existing music videos that fell into our chosen genre (pop and R&B), the reason we chose this specific genre is because we wanted our video to be fun and up tempo, these are some of the words I would personally use to describe the genre, as being a pop and R&B fan myself I have encountered a variety of videos and songs. We used YouTube to search for certain songs we believed where a part of that specific genre and watched the whole clip before collecting the embed code and inserting the video link onto our blogs, each of us then analysed 2 videos and linked them to media conventions. Collecting the embed code was simple as it was available just underneath the video link and was transferred quickly and easily and because YouTube is a world renowned website we knew it was highly unlikely that viruses could be caused.
After completing that task we went onto analyse both digipak and advert examples, again from pop and R&B artists, this would help us with our future tasks of creating our own digipak and advert as we could get tips and be able to notice clearly the elements used throughout each. For example; artists name, song title, an image of some sort, record label e.t.c. To collect these images we used simply Google Images and it came up with a range of different ones for us to choose from so meant it wasn’t hard for us to separately analyse 2 each, the images were of a average size so the examiner can look at it clearly and notice each aspect we have talked about but also Google allows you to save the images free of charge, which was useful for us as the process of saving the image and adding it to our blogs to analyse was completed very quickly. However a downfall to this program was that some of the images had no relevance to our genre and meant we did have to take a lot of lesson time to search for specific digipak and adverts that would link to our work.
When it came to filling in things like; the treatment sheet and call sheets for each destination and risk assessment, we simply used Microsoft Word as it meant the work was presented in a more professional manner compared to hand written and was another use of media program to show on our blogs. When it came to filling out the call sheet our subject tutors gave us mock ups of what to fill in for each destination, however the treatment sheet and risk assessment was all our own doing, from scratch we added all the information which meant it was easier for us to understand and put into our own words but also if any spelling errors should occur then this would show up on Microsoft Word and give us suggestions of what we might have meant, this small element could result in our work being of a higher level so it’s critical that we do check our spelling and grammar. After writing up our answers we copied the documents across to our blogs.
The final technology we used through the research and planning stage was the Sony Hard Drive Camera, in which we used to film our audience research, it’s a small hand held camera and very easy to work with, the only settings we used when collecting our research was the play and stop buttons; play when we were recording a person’s answers to the question and stop when they had finished and we then moved onto another student before the same process was put into place again. In previous lessons I have had problems with the camera’s running out of battery after a certain time; however this one was fully charged and lasted the duration of our recordings. When finished we simply used a wire to attach the camera to the MAC before selecting the file and copying it into I Movie which is the program that allowed us to select the best clips and put them into place in sync, this is a more simple program to use compared to Final Cut (which we used for our music video) as it has less settings to concentrate on, but overall throughout the duration of our research and planning a variety of technologies where used and all at the highest ability to show off each group members skills.
When we had completed the research and planning section of our blog, we then moved onto the construction of the music video. This included posts from discussions in the group to how we had put adverts and digipak together and the final version of the music video. The equipment in which we used to film our music video consisted of a Sony Hard Drive camera; this allowed us to create a variety of different shots through the cameras features such as zooming in to create meat shots. For some scenes we connected the camera to a tripod to allow smooth and steady camera movements for example the use of whip pan in our frantic running scene. However a downfall that came with the camera was its lack of battery charge as when filming some scenes the camera's battery descended rapidly. Also for the beginning scenes we filmed the tripod was of an unsteady quality and this did interfere with our clips which we reported back to our subject tutor with so she could bare it in mind when it came to viewing these clips in our video.
When it came to uploading our footage we used I movie in order to change each of the clips to a .mov format so the quality would be at its highest and at a more professional standard, then opened each of the clips into Final Cut where we could watch them in full and decide which would be successful enough to be included in the actual music video itself, due to the extreme quality of this program it meant we could cut back to specific parts of the video and separate them from others if it meant making the whole video look rushed and unedited. This is also the program we used to add on various effects to our clips; the jerky screen movement of our main character during the couch scene, we added this effect because we thought that the scene looked slightly boring compared to the rest of the video and by adding the effect to each separate clip it made each one of them more eye catching and interesting to look at.
It had elements which included a razor, where you could cut off a small part of the clip that we may not have wanted to use due to “camera faults” or “focus of the characters” e.t.c this was a process that took a small amount of time, it was the rendering of the large clips that took the longest, especially when we added effects on top of the clips, Final Cut had to select the clip and change it to the new version but because of the large files we were compressing it sometimes meant half the lesson was taken up by just rendering, so for next time we know to cut down our clips into sections.
An element that our group especially found useful was the fact we could speed up the clips to as fast as we wanted, we also had the option to change the clip to backwards these both came into use because the whole video is about making her look disjointed and mental and by changing these small things the small clip can look completely different. We added these two effects on a group of clips towards the end of the video, they all made a montage and linked into together well.
The final main point that Final Cut has compared to any other program is the amount of space you can use to edit clips, we made around 5 layers of different clips so they didn’t get mixed up, but you have the option to keep adding layers when needed but also locking the layers so none of the clips involved can’t move when we were focusing on a specific one, because as we found out if you don’t lock each layer and you make changes to one it moves the rest of the clips out of place.
After fully completing our music video each of the posts that came with it were basically just updating our blogs so all written work was done on there, apart from the rough cuts which needed to be compressed into Quick Time before being added to You Tube, we then took the embed code and updated them to our blog. We created 3 of these and it showed how each time we had changed the video to make it better.
Then it went onto the ancillary tasks (Digipak and Advert), these were both completed in Photoshop, However we used a Nikon camera to capture the photo shoot we put together especially for these two projects. When finished we selected the best few images and added them to Photoshop, because we had used a leopard print reflection not much editing needed to be done to the images themselves, except from a slight amount of contrast to increase the amount of emphasis on the print, it was just the marketing points we needed to include. For example on the digipak; the artists name, song title, list of songs, copyright information, bar code and company logo. As for the digipak; artist’s name, song title, phone scanner, release date, company logo, opinions from magazines and websites. All of these elements where added using the text tool on Photoshop we just downloaded the fonts separately from a internet font website and added them into the font selection for us to choose (Werewolf and Katy Berry), The barcode and phone scanner were both copied from Google images and transferred in as a new layer and our company logo was created in a new tab and then also transferred. The process of adding everything in didn’t take long it was more positioning each of the layers that was fiddly especially on the digipak.
Overall Photoshop was a successful program to use as I believe it had all the appropriate settings we needed to create the digipak and advert in a professional way. However some groups may have struggled to use it because it is slightly complicated, but because I am a photography student I do understand most things. Both files needed to be changed to a jpg before adding them to our blogs for analysis.
Finally we had to create evaluations to go along with our video; there were 4 separate questions which we devised out into the group equally. We decided to try and create each question using a different technology to show the examiner how diverse we are. However the options where very limited, we had the choice of a Prezi, creating our own video, Power point or we came up with our own plan for this question by writing it on Microsoft word then creating either recordings using Screenr of me showing how to use each program or just collecting screen grabs. For question 1 we decided to create a video because it’s the longest and most detailed question and would take less time talking about it and adding in other elements rather than write everything down. For this we used the media studio which is available through college to film our video because it has a green screen which we transferred our video onto as it played in the background as we talked so that viewers would have something to look at and the video was more entertaining rather than us sat in the classroom talking into the camera. There was also a range of lights available and we had the use of the ICT assistant to work all the controls and add our video to the green screen, but also add our writing onto the auto queue and control the speed e.t.c to a level that we could all read comfortably, without he’s help we wouldn’t have completed the video in the lesson time as we would of had to work everything ourselves so it was a great help. After filming all of the parts, the ICT assistant transferred each of the files onto my art drive so I could access them instantly in the classroom to start editing the video together. We again used Final Cut to put the video together, as well as including our filming from the studio we over lapped our voices with clips from our music video that linked in to what we were talking about but also downloaded videos via YouTube and Zamzar where you add the web address and convert to mov and the file gets sent to your hotmail account, these videos were the ones we were influenced by and also used clips from them to compare with our own. The same rules applied for Final Cut as above.
When evaluating questions 2& 3 we decided to use Prezi and I did one and Sophie completed the other. Prezi is an online power point website in which you can add loads of sections of writing and images and then make a path which links them all together before showing it finally in a power point. It’s a very easy program to use as you can change the fonts to what suits you and also the background and font colours using theme wizard (which I kept in with our brand identity – purple and the font – white) you also write whatever amount you need and then alter the size of how the font is shown on screen, you can also rotate it so it’s more interesting to look at. However because my question was so detailed I kept my writing all straight on and tried to separate some of the writing to ensure it was understandable for all. The only bad thing about prezi is that it has no spell checker, so this was very time consuming for me to go through everything I had written to check for mistakes, it would have been so much easier if it changed them automatically.
Finally this is evaluation question 4 which I have completed on Microsoft Word because it’s slightly like bringing everything together, so I thought it would be way too long to include in a video and too much to write about in a prezi, so this is the next most professional way to go around presenting it. It is also a program which checks spelling so has saved me a lot of time, however just presenting the question like this would be seen as “boring” compared to the way we have presented the other 3 questions in the evaluation section. So after completing the written part I am either going to record step by step tutorials using the Screenr program on the internet in which you record yourself talking through exactly what you are doing on screen, for example I could be adding text to Photoshop, as well as showing them where you add text I will also be talking through it. However with only one lesson left to complete the evaluations I may have to resort to something less adventurous, screen grabs of me completing certain tasks, both will be easy to understand just the Screenr might be more interesting to watch.
Overall I think using a lot of different technologies through this coursework module has give me lots of confidence to try new things but also made me passionate about creating each piece of my work to the highest standard I can because I have the resources to do it, I just need the motivation and I hope throughout everything I have done it’s clearly shown.
Rough Cut 2
This is the second rough cut of our music video, as you can see there are still quite big gaps missing and this is because we did film scenes for them but when we transferred onto final cut we didn't think they looked as successful as other parts of the video and we didn't want to make it look average using these clips when the rest looks really professional,so we decided that we are going to create a plan and re think what the location and ideas could be for the small parts of the video that we have left to film. This will be an easy job because our main character is really motivated when coming up with ideas and also when in front of the camera she tends to improvise a lot which is exactly what we need to get us rolling. What you can see in this rough cut is use of other editing techniques but also the fact that we have synced the film so well that our actress miming fits in perfectly and looks really realistic.
When it comes down to editing fully I don't think much needs to be done to our video, because everything syncs into place nicely. The only main thing that may need altering is the lighting in each separate clip because they were taken in different angles the light wont have been the same but it needs to look the same to viewers when watching so they could be altered. Also using various different effects will add variety to each one of our shots but also get us the extra marks for experimenting and trying out new techniques.
Rough Cut 1
We chose to film this part of the video because it only included our main character which meant because she is already in our class we didn't have to get anyone else together for example the male character as he was already in a lesson.
Test/Practice Footage
After filming our first scenes we decided that we couldn't use them as apart of our actual music video because we didn't include the blood which is a main element of the song choice and the concept because the main character needs blood around her mouth for the full video and all of her "victims" need it on their body somewhere so the viewers can see that she has attacked them, however the filming we have got doesn't relate to our chosen story line at all because it's not shown clearly. for example both characters are dressed well in there costumes however they look too "normal" the horror part of the video wasn't included (blood, darkness e.t.c).
This test footage we have converted into a you tube video includes the correct positioning and location that we want to use for the beginning of our video and they both got into character well (using the step by steps from the storyboard) so the only thing we need to do when we return from the half term break is re shoot this scene but include the blood in it so the viewers understand the "cannibal" story line easier. The reason we can't do it over the half term break is because our main character is going on holiday and no parts of the video don't include her somewhere in it, but on Thursday in the lesson as a group we talked through each scene and we know exactly what were doing when we get back, the full Tuesday and Wednesday in college will be full on filming everything at least twice so we have extra footage in case it's needed in the editing stage. While Emily is on holiday she is going to make the costumes for all the dancers who are going to be a part of the video and also come up with a dance routine which shouldn't take long for us to capture because the people in our video all do performing arts and some go to dancing so will be able to pick up moves easily.
Although we made this mistake, it's good we have made it at the beginning of the filming rather than in the middle otherwise more would have to be re filmed and I believe this set back has brought us together more as a group to do the best we possibly can when creating this music video.
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Existing Music Video Influence
Jolted Head Movements
Influence - Rihanna 'Disturbia'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Shaking Metal Bars
Influence - Rihanna 'Disturbia'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Dance Sequence
Influence - Rihanna 'Disturbia'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Overlapping Two Scenes
Influence - Rihanna 'Disturbia'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Black Lips
Influence - Lady Gaga 'Paparazzi'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Influence - Rihanna 'Disturbia'
Shaking Metal Bars
Influence - Rihanna 'Disturbia'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Dance Sequence
Influence - Rihanna 'Disturbia'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Overlapping Two Scenes
Influence - Rihanna 'Disturbia'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Black Lips
Influence - Lady Gaga 'Paparazzi'
Our Music Video - Kesha 'Cannibal'
Changes to video
When reviewing our music video we found that in a certain scene there was a continuity error with the actors. When we had filmed the shots of the people who the actress had killed we used a female actress, however this contrasted with the use of the three males in the tea party scene, as it was these actors that were supposed to be the victims. In order to solve this error we looked into our test footage and found that the actor we had used in the tea party scene was our actor for our test footage. We then took two shots from this footage, one of the male actor alone lying on the ground and the second of the main female actress hovering over him. We lengthened the clips in order for them to change to the beat so that it matched in with the other shots used in this particular scene. Through doing this we allowed our video to become overall more effective as the storyline throughout was now all related and made sense rather than including a random female. Another error that we found within our video was throughout the first chorus. When filming the male actor running there was a slight uneasy camera movement which shook side to side. This was overcome through cutting the footage in the place where the camera starts to move and inserting another shot of the actor running. Through doing this the scene improved vastly as one of the marking criteria points was steady hand shots and the shot became far more stable. The final error in which we found was that a scene which we had placed towards the end of the video in the final chorus looked out of place in comparison to the rest of the video. In the scene we had fast paced edited so that the actress was moving quickly however from the clips we had chosen the male actors from the tea party scene were in the background talking to one another. We decided that we wanted to keep the fast pace editing as it made the video look overall more effective and unrealistic so decided the best option would be to take different shots of the female actress in her different locations throughout the video, as through this scene being towards the end it would be like a recap of what she has done showing even further her unstable mind. We chose various shots of the actress in her main destinations such as on the gravel, walking down the stairs and behind the fence, to make the shots seem even more unrealistic we also reversed some of them so that the actress's head looked disjointed. By doing this we showed our understanding of our video's genre clearly as we edited clips in order to make them make the audience feel uneasy but also through using clips with previous destinations we showed that we understand the storyline of our video and the underlying theme of that she is no longer afraid to show all of her colors and be who she is.
The recognition of these mistakes in our video allowed us to be seen as working at a professional standard as we were recognizing mistakes in which were lowering our videos standard and altering them so that the video was to its highest ability.
The recognition of these mistakes in our video allowed us to be seen as working at a professional standard as we were recognizing mistakes in which were lowering our videos standard and altering them so that the video was to its highest ability.
Ancillary Task Feedback
The feedback in which we received based upon our ancillary task was mostly positive. There was various comments upon our use of integration and illustration and that it was well suited with the genre and how it all linked into the theme also the shooting material and the effectiveness of having the actress appear vicious with the contradiction of the pink girly colors. Comments were also made upon the awareness we had of the fonts and the use of two different styles and how we managed to ensure they were used throughout and were also included on the advert so that the two could be identified as being related. The negative feedback in which we received came from the framing of the shots as it was felt we could have used a variety of lengths and closeups in order to allow them to be more effective, as although we had used medium shots and a meat shot of the actress's face it was felt an extreme close up of the actress's eyes would have added more mystery to the actress as the eyes are the most intense feature on the female face.
I am overall pleased with the comments in which we received as we had taken into great consideration the different features which are found upon digipaks and ensured every minor detail was correct, again referring to the texts style and fonts. It is through the comments that we can see we have been successful in the production of our digipak and although it was felt different shots for the images could have been used we wished to show the actress in her different forms but together, almost like a preview into what was to come, hence the medium shots so that the emotions on her face were clear but that you could also see that she was in casual clothing.
I am overall pleased with the comments in which we received as we had taken into great consideration the different features which are found upon digipaks and ensured every minor detail was correct, again referring to the texts style and fonts. It is through the comments that we can see we have been successful in the production of our digipak and although it was felt different shots for the images could have been used we wished to show the actress in her different forms but together, almost like a preview into what was to come, hence the medium shots so that the emotions on her face were clear but that you could also see that she was in casual clothing.
Ancillary Feedback From Peers
During yesterdays lesson we got split up into our groups and were asked to analyse another groups digipak and advert by giving them 2 strengths that we believed made the work look of a professional standard and then 2 areas that they could improve on to get them into the higher level boundary. Jak and Jordan where the group to mark our ancillary tasks however we have only just completed the advert today so the comments they gave us where only regarding the digipak.
The first point they believed was a strength was the consistent brand identity shown throughout each piece of the digipak which showed we had thought about what elements to include to make an impression on viewers and hopefully sell the record we are trying to promote. The second positive point was that our digipak linked to the genre of music well, we decided to use the colour schemes and images to show the two sides to our character when she is portrayed behind the pink background she is just a normal human being however when she is behind the original leopard print that is her "cannibal" side reflecting through her angry facial expressions and quite wild and confident attitude, the reason we chose the leopard print is because we know Kesha always creates this over the top and bright and colourful as her genre is dance music every video is in your face so we wanted parts of the digipak to show that but also because she is a cannibal which is an animal we thought animal print would be the best reflection to use. The final strength they gave us was that we had a good colour choice the reason we chose both of the colours is you can see the writing clearly over the top and also see our model without it being a distraction.
The points they gave us to improve our digipak where; adding the company logo onto one of the sleeves rather than just small on the spine, the reason we put it there is because we thought it would be clear for everyone to see when looking at the digipak and looking at each part it would be noticeable as the text is white on a black background. We included the copyright information inside one of the sections however we did think putting the company logo next to that would have looked out of place and decided to just put it large on the cd itself instead. The second improvement they gave us was to use a variety of photos from the pink reflection as the model's pose is quite similar but the reason we chose both of these photos is because the photo shoot we constructed many of the outcomes where blurred due to faults with the camera so we only had limited options to choose from. But also even though she is stood in the same way her facial expressions are completely different as we wanted to show her looking quite shy and angelic so viewers would wonder how can she be a cannibal she just looks like any other teenage girl, by adding the photos to the digipak it does start to make viewers create a story about what's going to happen and also link it in with the music video itself.
Our peers also had to answer the question how effective is the brand identity? their responses where that the leopard print pattern was consistent throughout the whole digipak because we believed if we only included it on a few and changed the whole prospect of the other pieces then the digipak wouldn't link together at all. They then went onto say that our main character is clearly shown and because she is the main element of our music video we believed putting her in 4 out of the 6 sections was enough as the other 2 included the cd and the track list. By having her on so many of the sides it also promotes the music video more as she is the main character and the pattern is used throughout the music video which makes a direct link. They finally said that our font is related for the style of music we are working in. Previously Sophie downloaded a range of fonts so we could create a mood board of research however we only chose 2 to use, for the song title and track list we used "werewolf" font because it looked like claw marks through each letter and because cannibals would be feisty the link was again there. We then used the "katy berry" font for the artist's name as it was clear but also had a unique touch with the flicks coming from each letter which gave the digipak a girly element to contrast with the drama filled storyline.
Overall I believe the feedback given from my peers was of a high and positive standard and to an extent I agree with it, when I noticed what they wrote about adding the company logo to other places except just the spine because it wasn't clearly noticeable I immediately agreed with what they were saying and added it to the track list side and it was of a medium size and because it was white on the leopard print background it stood out instantly and overall this comment was helpful as I understood where they were coming from and it's improved our digipak for the better and also now links into the brand identity and promoting the single and the digipak. However the other comment about creating more of a variety of images using the pink background as both images are completely different the other similarity is that she is standing in the same way however this may not have been clear to our peers as both images are upside down so you can't clearly see the detail. So I believe leaving the photos how they are will be ok.
The targets that I am going to set myself for the end of the week is to fully complete our advert and analyse step by step instructions about how I made it on my blog, change the end scene of our music video to something more successful as that specific part looks rushed and not thought out. Finally if I have time go through the digipak and advert again and create some screen grabs to analyse on my blog so the examiner can see clearly what steps I went through to get the complete outcome.
The first point they believed was a strength was the consistent brand identity shown throughout each piece of the digipak which showed we had thought about what elements to include to make an impression on viewers and hopefully sell the record we are trying to promote. The second positive point was that our digipak linked to the genre of music well, we decided to use the colour schemes and images to show the two sides to our character when she is portrayed behind the pink background she is just a normal human being however when she is behind the original leopard print that is her "cannibal" side reflecting through her angry facial expressions and quite wild and confident attitude, the reason we chose the leopard print is because we know Kesha always creates this over the top and bright and colourful as her genre is dance music every video is in your face so we wanted parts of the digipak to show that but also because she is a cannibal which is an animal we thought animal print would be the best reflection to use. The final strength they gave us was that we had a good colour choice the reason we chose both of the colours is you can see the writing clearly over the top and also see our model without it being a distraction.
The points they gave us to improve our digipak where; adding the company logo onto one of the sleeves rather than just small on the spine, the reason we put it there is because we thought it would be clear for everyone to see when looking at the digipak and looking at each part it would be noticeable as the text is white on a black background. We included the copyright information inside one of the sections however we did think putting the company logo next to that would have looked out of place and decided to just put it large on the cd itself instead. The second improvement they gave us was to use a variety of photos from the pink reflection as the model's pose is quite similar but the reason we chose both of these photos is because the photo shoot we constructed many of the outcomes where blurred due to faults with the camera so we only had limited options to choose from. But also even though she is stood in the same way her facial expressions are completely different as we wanted to show her looking quite shy and angelic so viewers would wonder how can she be a cannibal she just looks like any other teenage girl, by adding the photos to the digipak it does start to make viewers create a story about what's going to happen and also link it in with the music video itself.
Our peers also had to answer the question how effective is the brand identity? their responses where that the leopard print pattern was consistent throughout the whole digipak because we believed if we only included it on a few and changed the whole prospect of the other pieces then the digipak wouldn't link together at all. They then went onto say that our main character is clearly shown and because she is the main element of our music video we believed putting her in 4 out of the 6 sections was enough as the other 2 included the cd and the track list. By having her on so many of the sides it also promotes the music video more as she is the main character and the pattern is used throughout the music video which makes a direct link. They finally said that our font is related for the style of music we are working in. Previously Sophie downloaded a range of fonts so we could create a mood board of research however we only chose 2 to use, for the song title and track list we used "werewolf" font because it looked like claw marks through each letter and because cannibals would be feisty the link was again there. We then used the "katy berry" font for the artist's name as it was clear but also had a unique touch with the flicks coming from each letter which gave the digipak a girly element to contrast with the drama filled storyline.
Overall I believe the feedback given from my peers was of a high and positive standard and to an extent I agree with it, when I noticed what they wrote about adding the company logo to other places except just the spine because it wasn't clearly noticeable I immediately agreed with what they were saying and added it to the track list side and it was of a medium size and because it was white on the leopard print background it stood out instantly and overall this comment was helpful as I understood where they were coming from and it's improved our digipak for the better and also now links into the brand identity and promoting the single and the digipak. However the other comment about creating more of a variety of images using the pink background as both images are completely different the other similarity is that she is standing in the same way however this may not have been clear to our peers as both images are upside down so you can't clearly see the detail. So I believe leaving the photos how they are will be ok.
The targets that I am going to set myself for the end of the week is to fully complete our advert and analyse step by step instructions about how I made it on my blog, change the end scene of our music video to something more successful as that specific part looks rushed and not thought out. Finally if I have time go through the digipak and advert again and create some screen grabs to analyse on my blog so the examiner can see clearly what steps I went through to get the complete outcome.
Marking Criteria Analysis
Marketing Criteria
- shooting material appropriate to the task set; including controlled use of the camera, attention to framing, variety of shot sizes and close attention to the mise en scene
- editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer and making selective and appropriate use of shot transitions, captions and other effects
- recording and editing sound with images appropriately
For the first point I believe there are parts in our video where the camera control is slightly juddered due to the rocky surface the tripod was resting on but also the fact that there are so many quick cuts in the song the main character was moving around quiet quickly without indicating to me that she would be doing it which meant I had to zoom in and out quite a lot to create a variety of shots to make the video look a lot more appealing and interesting to watch. However apart from the beginning scenes the rest of the video is very focused and clear. The part of the video when Emily says "you better run" is the only place where I believe the framing could have been altered a small amount so that she was directly in the centre of the shot rather than lower down as you can't see her costume clearly and there is too much background however it's too late to re film now it's just points we could think about for next time.
The shots that are mainly seen throughout our video are medium/long shots to show full length body shots of each actor and also length of the whole scene we were working in. Also meat shots (close ups) of our main character's face as these are the most common shots used in most music videos. They do range from medium to long to close up quite a lot due to the large amount of cuts during the song you can't see which is which but you can tell they are different so as a group we used our skills to the best of our ability.
The mise en scene was a section of the video we focused on quite a lot as outfits where put together depending on the location, our main character supported 4 outfits throughout the video and where all inspired from ideas we came across in the planning stage of the coursework. Each one showed off her figure in the best way possible however some may have been more revealing than others but we wanted to show the "sex appeal".
The second questions talks about the editing process of the video, this took us the longest to do as we needed to create a lot of cuts but also put it in a sequence which floated through correctly. Because we filmed the scenes exactly how we wanted each of them to look as final pieces not a lot of filters where added only to the leopard print costume scene as we thought by adding a shaking effect to the motion of her movement it would make her look more disjointed and freaky which links in with the character she is trying to portray so this worked well, however no other effects where added to our footage. The only other thing we changed after putting all the video into place was placed one clip on top of another and lowered the opacity which had a professional touch to the whole scenario.
The last question links only to the main character and I believe she is one of the only actress's in our class that lip synced perfectly throughout the whole video as some members of the class either were not in time or didn't concentrate on that element where as for us it was the main thing to focus on because if we wanted it to look like any other video Ke$ha had done before syncing her lips to the words was going to be the most important. However when we were filming the sound was really quiet as it was played through a phone so when importing each clip into Final Cut some changes had to be made in the way that they would have to be slowed down or sped up to keep in time with the original song, this was very hard as it kept moving clips along that came after the actual one we were working on at the time but the end result is exactly what we hoped for. The only thing I believe we would change next time is using more imaginative locations which would get us into the level 4 boundary.
- shooting material appropriate to the task set; including controlled use of the camera, attention to framing, variety of shot sizes and close attention to the mise en scene
- editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer and making selective and appropriate use of shot transitions, captions and other effects
- recording and editing sound with images appropriately
For the first point I believe there are parts in our video where the camera control is slightly juddered due to the rocky surface the tripod was resting on but also the fact that there are so many quick cuts in the song the main character was moving around quiet quickly without indicating to me that she would be doing it which meant I had to zoom in and out quite a lot to create a variety of shots to make the video look a lot more appealing and interesting to watch. However apart from the beginning scenes the rest of the video is very focused and clear. The part of the video when Emily says "you better run" is the only place where I believe the framing could have been altered a small amount so that she was directly in the centre of the shot rather than lower down as you can't see her costume clearly and there is too much background however it's too late to re film now it's just points we could think about for next time.
The shots that are mainly seen throughout our video are medium/long shots to show full length body shots of each actor and also length of the whole scene we were working in. Also meat shots (close ups) of our main character's face as these are the most common shots used in most music videos. They do range from medium to long to close up quite a lot due to the large amount of cuts during the song you can't see which is which but you can tell they are different so as a group we used our skills to the best of our ability.
The mise en scene was a section of the video we focused on quite a lot as outfits where put together depending on the location, our main character supported 4 outfits throughout the video and where all inspired from ideas we came across in the planning stage of the coursework. Each one showed off her figure in the best way possible however some may have been more revealing than others but we wanted to show the "sex appeal".
The second questions talks about the editing process of the video, this took us the longest to do as we needed to create a lot of cuts but also put it in a sequence which floated through correctly. Because we filmed the scenes exactly how we wanted each of them to look as final pieces not a lot of filters where added only to the leopard print costume scene as we thought by adding a shaking effect to the motion of her movement it would make her look more disjointed and freaky which links in with the character she is trying to portray so this worked well, however no other effects where added to our footage. The only other thing we changed after putting all the video into place was placed one clip on top of another and lowered the opacity which had a professional touch to the whole scenario.
The last question links only to the main character and I believe she is one of the only actress's in our class that lip synced perfectly throughout the whole video as some members of the class either were not in time or didn't concentrate on that element where as for us it was the main thing to focus on because if we wanted it to look like any other video Ke$ha had done before syncing her lips to the words was going to be the most important. However when we were filming the sound was really quiet as it was played through a phone so when importing each clip into Final Cut some changes had to be made in the way that they would have to be slowed down or sped up to keep in time with the original song, this was very hard as it kept moving clips along that came after the actual one we were working on at the time but the end result is exactly what we hoped for. The only thing I believe we would change next time is using more imaginative locations which would get us into the level 4 boundary.
Thursday, 5 January 2012
Finishing DigiPak and One on One
In today's lesson we managed to finish our digipak completely but the reason it took us all lesson is because a lot of elements where still missing. Firstly we added a phone bar code which means that any fans with a mobile phone can scan the bar code and get instantly transferred to either iTunes where they can purchase the single/album or the artist's own website where they can view news about her, images that have been taken by fans also all of her videos throughout her career. Yesterday we completed the front cover of our album using the text from the werewolf font we downloaded however today we decided that having the artist's name and the song title in different fonts would be a better option, so we used Katy Berry font for the artists name which looked bold but also looked reasonable similar to the original. When I was certain that the text now looked of a professional standard it was a part of our brand identity and we added the artist's name and the song title to one spine of the digipak and on the other featured our record label "rawr records" which we also spent the lesson creating a logo for which consisted of a paw print with two r's inside and the copyright logo, it's simple but it works really well. The final thing we did was write a short sentence about the copyright information and who was responsible for the album e.t.c.
Throughout the lesson our subject tutor was calling each group up one at a time to talk about what levels she believes we are working at individually and what she scored our music video overall and why. We were told that our video had been given 31 which was the level 3 boundary as we were not as imaginative as other groups in our class with the locations and some of the camera work at the beginning of the video was quite poor, although she told us this information we can't change or re film any parts from the beginning as the deadline was weeks ago however me and Sophie do believe that a small part from the end of the video looks like it's been added to just fill in the gap and has no relevance at all so just by taking that out it might make the video look a lot more in sync and flow better. She also told us we could get a good mark overall if we do well with our digipak and advert and also the evaluation questions which is why I am going to make a to do list to make sure we cover all the points. However now we have fully completed the digipak next job is to add the information onto the cd template before analysing it our blogs and then creating the advert.
Throughout the lesson our subject tutor was calling each group up one at a time to talk about what levels she believes we are working at individually and what she scored our music video overall and why. We were told that our video had been given 31 which was the level 3 boundary as we were not as imaginative as other groups in our class with the locations and some of the camera work at the beginning of the video was quite poor, although she told us this information we can't change or re film any parts from the beginning as the deadline was weeks ago however me and Sophie do believe that a small part from the end of the video looks like it's been added to just fill in the gap and has no relevance at all so just by taking that out it might make the video look a lot more in sync and flow better. She also told us we could get a good mark overall if we do well with our digipak and advert and also the evaluation questions which is why I am going to make a to do list to make sure we cover all the points. However now we have fully completed the digipak next job is to add the information onto the cd template before analysing it our blogs and then creating the advert.
Digipak Editing January
Before the holidays we put all of our pictures into each section of the digipak template so all that was left to do was be certain that they were all the same dimensions before adding any extra elements such as text because getting the images the correct size to fit in the allocated box took time as the spines also needed to be thought about, because if I want a high level grade extra finishing touches need to be added to make it look much more professional. So adding text (artist name, song title and record label) will add to the brand identity especially if I use the same text (werewolf). So in today's lesson my main goal was to make sure that all images where in the correct positions with correct space between each for the spines to make it look believable but also start adding elements which would instantly make the digipak stand out to our target audience, the artists name and the chosen song we have created the video for. The first thing I did was fill in spaces which needed to be coloured dark grey for our spines as some sections of the digipak wouldn't have linked otherwise however when I selected the box tool and then the fill tool nothing was happening until I realised the layer for the template was locked and when I unlocked I completed this part of the task relatively quickly. After putting everything perfectly into place there was some parts I thought could of looked better for example our front cover contained two halves of our main character's face and as a group we decided it would be better to only use one half so there would be more room for our text as we need to let the buyers know who this artist is and what the song is called so they can make there own impression and if we left the other half in the text would either be too small to see or overlapping our main character's face which would take the attraction away from her because she is supposed to be the main element throughout our digipak as she is the character that is used the most in our video, creating this links shows we have thought outside the box.
When the small changes where made I then added in the text to the digipak which consisted of the werewolf font which we downloaded previously to make sure it was available exactly when we needed it, we decided to use the same font throughout our digipak to create a brand identity so the Artists Name KESHA the Song Title CANNIBAL and each of the tracks from the album ANIMAL/CANNIBAL where shown in the werewolf font we also used the colour scheme of white because it's simplistic and professional but it's also the only colour we thought worked with our busy backgrounds in each section as we did try red to link into the "cannibal" theme however it looked slightly tacky and didn't represent our brand in the way we were hoping. Then added in a bar code to make the digipak look slightly more realistic which I re sized to fit in with the dimensions of the corner section where I placed it. Finally at the end of the lesson we just had time to come up with a name for our record company and because cannibal is seen as a vicious creature we thought "Rawr Records" had a positive ring to it and linked into our brand identity as it has some meaning to the song title however we decided to change the font to (Katy Berry) to ensure there was no mix up between the linked layout.
When the small changes where made I then added in the text to the digipak which consisted of the werewolf font which we downloaded previously to make sure it was available exactly when we needed it, we decided to use the same font throughout our digipak to create a brand identity so the Artists Name KESHA the Song Title CANNIBAL and each of the tracks from the album ANIMAL/CANNIBAL where shown in the werewolf font we also used the colour scheme of white because it's simplistic and professional but it's also the only colour we thought worked with our busy backgrounds in each section as we did try red to link into the "cannibal" theme however it looked slightly tacky and didn't represent our brand in the way we were hoping. Then added in a bar code to make the digipak look slightly more realistic which I re sized to fit in with the dimensions of the corner section where I placed it. Finally at the end of the lesson we just had time to come up with a name for our record company and because cannibal is seen as a vicious creature we thought "Rawr Records" had a positive ring to it and linked into our brand identity as it has some meaning to the song title however we decided to change the font to (Katy Berry) to ensure there was no mix up between the linked layout.
Digipak Editing
We handed our final cut of the music video in on Wednesday so the next thing our group needed to create was a digipak (cardboard cd package), we completed the photo shoot a month ago so all we needed to do was decide which images we were going to use and how we were going to set it out. Because we used pink and original coloured leopard print through the shoot we decided that one side of the package should be an original leopard print theme and the other side pink, this would mean that two photos from each section would be included either side with the original backgrounds in the middle, also because we used these patterns throughout our music video it linked in well and shows that we thought about how we could link in all of our products together because we hopefully will keep the theme running through the advert and any other promo marketing we create.
Because I rarely buy cd's anymore I was unsure about what a digipak looked like, however after I familiarised myself with the layout the plans came together quickly. After downloading a template me and Sophie attempted to put each image into each box however because we had taken some of the images portrait they would have to be cropped down to fit into the box perfectly, this was unexpected because we didn't realise that the set out would be all landscape so instead of cropping the full image down we just shrunk them and added another version of the background to the cover to make sure when we rubbed out the original image there was something behind it. This wasn't what we had hoped the digipak would look like but because we had a "plan b" it all came together. In our last lesson of Media before Christmas break we got every background section put into place and one image shrinked and positioned correctly but we know exactly what our objectives and aims are for when we return. I believe because our digipak includes elements from the music video it shows we have considered a variety of marketing prospects but also popularity of the video because if this was a real pop star scenario they want to make videos that sell and any extra creations will go on top of that and I hope if we stick to our plans the final outcome will be special.
Because I rarely buy cd's anymore I was unsure about what a digipak looked like, however after I familiarised myself with the layout the plans came together quickly. After downloading a template me and Sophie attempted to put each image into each box however because we had taken some of the images portrait they would have to be cropped down to fit into the box perfectly, this was unexpected because we didn't realise that the set out would be all landscape so instead of cropping the full image down we just shrunk them and added another version of the background to the cover to make sure when we rubbed out the original image there was something behind it. This wasn't what we had hoped the digipak would look like but because we had a "plan b" it all came together. In our last lesson of Media before Christmas break we got every background section put into place and one image shrinked and positioned correctly but we know exactly what our objectives and aims are for when we return. I believe because our digipak includes elements from the music video it shows we have considered a variety of marketing prospects but also popularity of the video because if this was a real pop star scenario they want to make videos that sell and any extra creations will go on top of that and I hope if we stick to our plans the final outcome will be special.
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