DIGIPAK IDEAS

I've been looking for ideas for the digipak that we need to create to go along with the video created for the artist (Mia Knight). I previously looked at Ellie Goulding, Pixie Lott, and Diana Vickers and did a collage of various album covers for each artist. I liked the idea of using light and strips of paint added to the photo of the artist. 

I saw a few album covers that give a few ideas on features to play around with; colour, shapes, cutting, and fonts. Jack Johnson's album cover uses a usual image of him playing his guitar and singing in which if he doesn't include two colours (green and red) it would look dull and boring, but the colour really does give the photograph life and interest. Solex made her photograph divide into blue rectangles and squares (with a couple pink ones) and adds a funky font in yellow with the artist name so it draws attention towards it. 

The Doups decided to approach the use of photograph differently with lots of pictures of parts of peoples face and put them in lots of small triangles that adjust well together. The Kooks used a normal photograph and played with the title, font and colour. I think it's quite clever the way they use colour to differentiate the album title and the artists name and the idea of having the word 'KOOKS' aligned to perfectly fit below 'THE'.

The Album Titles.

The Albums

PRODUCTION: ROUGH CUT ANALYSIS

Mr group and I produced two rough cut videos. I will provide an analysis of both.

Firstly, our original rough cut was not fully edited. We just put our favourite clips together and lip synced it

properly. However we still needed to make a big change to the colour as my group had come to the decision that we preferred a pink tint to the clips. This idea was inspired by the Rihanna - 'Only girl in the world' video. We really wanted a vintage theme, so following through the pink tones was perfect.

ROUGH CUT ONE FEEDBACK:

We were told by Louisa not to 'over edit' as we had we were really ahead so we had a lot of time to edit, she really enjoyed the natural lighting we had from our locations. At that time we only added the pink tint to a few a few clips, so Louisa recommended that if we change the colour we should throughout or not at all. Therefore we decided that we were going to change the colour on the whole video. 

Secondly Mary had told us that a few clips look a bit awkward and unnecessary, and advised that we should replace them. 

This is where she looks quite nervous and awkward. So we just added a different clip before it so it covers the awkward part.

She doesn't sing much and i looks a bit weird and less professional compared to the rest of the clips so we removed it.

So for our second rough cut we made all the changes our teachers had advised us to do and added the sepia tone.

However we had another slight hitch, by editing too much we could effect the pixelation so we had to be careful how much we changed the colour.

ROUGH CUT TWO FEEDBACK:
We were told that is we made out video too pink it would affect the pixelation, and the moderater would not be able to view the video properly so we would essentially lose marks. However we did not over on the 'tinting' but we did follow the spepia tone throughout our video as we really enjoyed the vintage style.

DIGIPAK IDEAS

With our music video we need to create a digipak and advert for the artist. I was looking at other female artists of similar genre, they are all more or less the same and mostly consist of a mid or close-up shot of the artist with the addition of lines of paint or shiny circles.

Ellie Goulding album covers

Diana Vickers album covers

Pixie Lott album covers

After researching similar artists (female) of the same genre I have a good idea of what kind of album cover i'll be doing. I particularly like the second Ellie Goulding one in which you have a photo of her and a light that has either been added on Photoshop or a similar program or with a light bulb/torch. This is something that I learnt to do in Photography As-level using a DSLR camera. I did this by setting the ISO to 100 and when you click to take the photo it gives you a certain amount of time in which you can move the light around to maybe create a word or shape.

I also like the idea of using paint like in the second Pixie Lott album cover on this post where you have a photograph of her and two strips of paint running across from her back to the back of her head.

Production: Rough Cut Analysis

We have posted two rough cuts, the first with a few edits and the second with the edits perfected so that all of the clips look the same and have the same colours.

We used an effect to give it a vintage style look, we created it using colour correction and the colour mainly constituted of pink as shown in the video below.

Although it was less pixelated without the effect, I think the effect works well with various shots and it goes well with the genre which is often associated with vintage (mainly in terms of the style, but we wanted to add colours). Also the colour of some of the clips was really nice, but some of them needed to be edited and we felt like we couldn't really mix both vintage colours and natural colour. 

The real issue we had was sorting out the shades, because the exposure had changed from clip to clip, the effect looked different on each one, so we selected a particular one that we liked and adjusted the rest of them to that level. 

Some of the feedback that we got suggests that the video was better without editing/adding colour into the shots, but we felt like somehow without the colour it looked a little dull. The key I think is not to over edit the clips and make it so pink it just puts people off, but just enough to make it a little different. 

Before entering the production process we wanted to add an effect that would make it look as though it was always sunny, like in the Florence And The Machine 'Rabbit Heart' video (on the below). 

This effect does however appear naturally in the clip were the artist is walking around the little hut towards the end. Although it does appear we found that there was a person sitting in the background so we didn't include it. 

The colour differences

All in all, I think the video turned out more or less as we planned. Although I think it would have worked better if we had bigger frames like we planned (but it would have been really difficult to bring along having already planned to bring outfits and the tripod and camera all the way to Richmond (on public transport). It would have also been better for the artist to wear the same outfits near to the end, where you can see her skipping/jumping (wearing black top and bottom with brown boots) and the male actor walking down the steps (wearing blue jumper), and then it cuts to the boy tapping the girls shoulder (her wearing a different outfit and him wearing the same). And even though we didn't receive great feedback for the colour effect, we like it and we think it works well. We did take into account the feedback we got and turned the effects down a bit but still keeping the vintage look identifiable. 

Production: Day 6 Editing

In our video there is one particular clip that we are having trouble editing the colour. When we recorded these portobello shots, it was very rainy and dull so it reflected in the shot. In this shot Alia looks very pale and we found it difficult to match the colour of this one with the other ones. 

This is what the clip looked like after we copied the the same colour all throughout.

We viewed the video on a big screen so we could check whether the colour that we added to the video would pixelate when projected on to a big screen. We checked it and there was no effect but we found that the colour on the computer looked different to the color on the big screen. Though the big screen we managed to edit the colour of that particular clip.

Here are a few screengrabs of our tweaking of the colours. 

PRODUCTION: 2ND ROUGH CUT ANALYSIS

This time around there wasn't much that needed doing. We just need to tune the colours for some of the clips because each of them have different lighting do that makes the colour that we add, vary from every clip. what we did was use the colour  from the clip at the end and then copy and paste it on to every clip. Then we would tweak each clip individually so to get more or less the same colour fort every clip. We are having trouble with one particular clip which is especially different to the rest.

ROUGH CUT 2

We took the suggested improvements into consideration and made some changes to our rough cut. In our first rough cut we didn't make alterations to the colour for all clips, so we did it for our second rough cut attempt. 

Production: Day 5 Editing

Last lesson we experimented with the colour effects and came to a decision on a particular colour. We copy and pasted it onto other clips to see how it would all look put together and found that the clips were then different shades because initially they were not the same colour.

Today we focused on fixing this, we know it will take time but by using colour corrector we can try to get more or less all the clips to look the same or at least similar in terms of colouring.

After having shown our rough cut to our teacher we got a few ideas on how to improve it. She explained that some clips, in her view, were not well fitted into the video.  We decided today to take them out and replace them with others that might look better. In one in particular she explained that the acting was not up to standard, as the actress looked a little uncomfortable in front of camera.

Because our song is not the most upbeat song then we want to focus on the sections that are upbeat to make sure that the clip changes are matching the beat. Towards the end we have a few slow-but-clear-beats and the clips that are used are the ones that show both the actor and actress individually walking/skipping with which what we aimed to achieve was to get one clip to change to another exactly on the beat. We sorted it out so that every time a beat is heard the clips switch, and with the shot of the guy walking towards the girl it jumps to further forward in the clip (so you can see the guy is closer to the girl) as shown in the clip below.

Production: Day 4 Editing

Today finished off adding, removing and cutting clips and saved our rough cut (which is up on the blog). Now that we are more or less finished with the basic editing we want to experiment on colours and other effects (e.g. fades).

We focused on colour effects and played around with the colour corrector on Final Cut Pro, trying out different ones to see what we think would suit our video the most. The colours are very normal and dull, and we think that the shade/effect that we have chosen will give it a more vintage-look to it. We also tested out the Filters (on FCP)  to see how that would change the clips and whether we liked it or not.

Once we had found a particular colour effect that we liked we copy and pasted it onto some of the other clips to see how it would turn out. The issue with that is that because they were filmed in different locations at different times and dates then the light is different. Some days we had brilliant, sunny light but on others it was dark and raining so the effect that would work on one of the clips needs to be adjusted for the rest of them to look the same/have similar colour.

This lesson was more about experimenting than anything else, we needed to figure out what kind of effects we wanted to use and whether they worked well or not. Next lesson we shall focus more on perfecting the effects and make it flowy/even instead of having one clip one colour and the next in a different shade.

ROUGH CUT ANALYSIS

We finished our rough cut and we are mostly done with our video. The only major things we have to do is add the colour which is in the clip at the end, all throughout the video. This is done though Colour Correction 3-way. We knew we wanted to and a tint to the video but when we started to play around with the colours we discovered that we really liked the pink look inspired by many Rihanna videos like;

'Only Girl In The World' 

'Man Down'

We really like the idea of the tint because it gives a warm autumn effect which is the kind of theme we wanted fromt the very beginning.  

After reviewing the video and getting feedback we found that this clip:

looked very awkward and was unnecessary as she only sings two words, so we removed it. 

This clip also looked awkward because she looks away and she looks uncomfortable so we decided to make the clip that follows this one come in slightly earlier so to cover what she says in this one.

In this clip she looks away when she says 'a sky' which looked strange because you cant see her singing.

 So what we chose to do is insert this clip instead to fill the part where she looks away.

The end, where the actor is seen walking down the path to the girl, is something we need to finish. We want to use elipsis so that we can fit the whole clip in by fading to black on the beat so that he skips a few steps every time he reappears on the screen. 

ROUGH CUT

Ideas for Digipak

We were looking through the internet for ideas for our digipak and came across this photo of Ellie Goulding. This photo gave us the influence to take our digipak photos in Richmond as we really liked the location and gives the audience an idea of what the video will be about and what the locations in the music video will be like.






These two photos of Pixie Lott are also very nice and I love the lighting and the poses she does.

Production: Teaser Research

Many artist post teasers on YouTube to countdown the days to their music video's release date. We were thinking it might be a nice idea to do one too. Teasers are used as a sort of countdown, like a calendar, and seing as we have a Rough Cut and a Final Deadline, it would be good for us to do the same for the both the deadlines. Usher and David Guetta did two for their music video;

One Direction also did teasers for their music video, and because there were 5 of them, they did 5 different ones for each individual, with the first released 5 days before the official release date; 

Production: Day 3 Editing

Today we are focusing on adding the last few clips onto the timeline and adding effects to them.
We focused special attention on the tree scene placed three quarters of the way through our video. The tree scene involves the hanging frames on which we wrote the sentence 'Revisiting memories to bring back a person' which we used in our pitch to describe our music video in a sentence. It was sort of a last minute idea to add the words onto the frame because we were unable to get hold of good photographs that would look relevant to the story of memories and the boy. We thought of having photographs of different places but we thought people might not understand that the pictures symbolise the places she had visited with the boy.

We decided while editing to get the shots of the words and the shot of the artist standing on a hill in Richmond to mix, so it goes: frame/artist/frame/artist/frame. In this short video you can see the girls editing this part of the video.

With the words on the frame we had a little bit of a problem, we thought that because the words were not clear (in the shot of artist walking past the frames to sit on the tree branch) we should probably change it. We put the shots of the individual frames first and then added the shot of the artist walking past them (also changing onto the shot of the artist on a hill in Richmond). We decided to ask a few people what they thought, and here is a video of them watching and commenting on that particular part (this is before we included the individual shots of the frames): 

While looking through the video, from the beginning we changed our minds on the black and white shot.   The extreme close-up of the artist breathing air (where you can see its a little foggy) that we had turned into black and white, we have now decided to change back to colour just because it looks a little odd (with the other colour clips and suddenly it jumps to that black and white one).  

When testing out colours we found a near-to-sepia type colour that looks great with the shots of the artist on the hill in Richmond. The idea is to use that in various other shots, but without ruining the nice sunlight we have in some of the shots.

IDEAS FOR DIGIPAK

I was looking through the UK top 40 singles chart and i saw the cover for Rizzle Kicks' 'When I was a Youngster' and i loved the colour they used for it. I also really like how they have their own font which as soon as someone sees it will associate with them which is something i would like to apply to my digipak. The final thing that i like about this cover is how they have two different fonts, one for the name of the group and another for the name of the song. 

BLOG OF THE WEEK!

After finding out that groups were going head to head to win the position of blog of the week we upped our game and look for so many different way to make our blog more interesting. We are very happy and will try and keep it up! 

Production: DAY 2 EDITING

While Eda and Dipika are editing, and Alia is blogging I chose to look up how to do different effects on FCP and here are the videos of where I found out how to do them. I found out how to play about with the colours and how to create the 'Sin City' look called  The Pleasentville effect.

We also learnt how to turn clips into black and white.

Screen Recordings

Production: DAY 2 EDITING

We already have a good part of our music video clips selected and put into place on the timeline. Today was about just lip-syncing and adding extra effects like turning clips to black and white and changing the contrast.

In a few music videos, artists have used both black and white and colour shots mixed together, and Ellie Gouldings 'Your Song' would be a great example of that.

While Eda and Dipika were editing, Judith researched how to create the Light Leak Effect for Final Cut Pro. This effect is well presented in the Florence and The Machine video for the song 'Rabbit Heart'. 

We think that this is a useful effect not often used in student music videos or in pro ones that much either. It goes well with the autumn/ sunny/ warm theme and although it was already quite sunny when we went out filming, in all (except one) of the clips you cannot see this effect which we assumed would naturally happen if it were a sunny day, which it was.  While Judith researched how to add the Light Leak Effect she found a colour correction tutorial. We tested it out with our footage and were able to change the colours like the ones in Rihanna 'What's My Name' and 'Only Girl (In The World)'.

ALBUM COVER IDEAS

As we are waiting for our next media lesson so that we can continue editing. I decided to take the opportunity to start looking at ideas for the cover of the digipak. When i was editing a few of my own images I came across a website called http://pixlr.com/ and here there are many effects which I am thinking of using. in the slideshow below are a few examples. I really like the idea of light leaks, sun reflections and old/used effects.

Photo Idea on Google!

For our music video we came up with the idea of having an old photo of a building/shop in Portobello Road aligned with the actual setting and then removing the photo and seeing how its changed and what is there. I then found that Google had actually done the same thing.

I think it was quite a good idea, specially because our music video was based on a love song and the idea of memories. We described our music video in a sentence and it went along the lines of: 'Revisiting memories to bring back a person'. This was the reason we used photographs in our video, they were used with the idea that those were the places they had previously visited together (the artist and male actor) and she revisits them.

BLOG IDEAS

We decided to customize our blog a little and thought that maybe changing the header would be a great way to do so. Because our music video follows a more nature/autumn theme then we wanted to stick to that, using the sky, trees, leaves, birds to do so. We decided to use both Photoshop and an online editing tool called Picnik to create them. Here are a couple that we made:

We haven't yet decided on the final one, or whether we will be using these or making others, but in the mean time we have chosen one to use for our blog.

Last year none of us really worked on our blogs or blogging, and although we are aware the most important thing on our blogs is the content (text, photos, research, etc.) we also think that personalizing our blog will make our blog look better and in a way encourage us to blog more!

We think that having a header and other little things on our blog differentiates our blog from all the other student blogs and makes it look more like a blog we want to post on rather than a blog we are made post on.

PRODUCTION: Animation Of Our First Day Of Editing (Our American Friend)

BLOG IDEAS

We were looking for ideas on how to make our blog more interesting and we came across this picture:

This made us start to think about what kind of background or theme each of our digipacks should look like. Then we decided to make our own with our artists name and the song. 

Aslo we remembered that Charlene Soraia's 'wherever you will go' had a similar single cover so we might look to that for inspiration when we come to it.

PRODUCTION: Skills Development

Compared to the AS year, planning and production of this video has improved dramatically. My group last year lacked motivation and this reflected in our music however we did pull through. I think what went wrong, was not the production but lack of planning and the amount of time we spent on it. The production such as filming however i think was of similar standard compared to this year. Last year filming went smoothly, all the shots was focused and we used a variety of angles. I think the idea we came up with was really good however we did not project it into our work as well as we could have for example we should have been open to different locations, and extra filming days. Also we could have improved on props. The editing process could have been a lot better because it was rushed and not really thought about, just last minute preparations.

This year ALOT of planning has gone into our music video. We did large amounts of research on Ellie Goulding and similar artists so that we could incorporate these styles and themes into our music video.  We went on the actual artist website http://elliegoulding.com/. This enabled us to really get a sense of Ellie Goulding, which then gave us ideas about props such as clothing, footwear.

We decided on locations after we watched a few of her videos (below) because we wanted her 'touch' on our music video. So we needed to use similar styles of clothing and locations. Alia discovered the locations, portobello road, richmond and new river walk.

Initially we began to brainstorm ideas. We then wrote a list of potential scenes then created our animatic story board. This enabled us to get a clearer idea of what scenes we want to film and really visualise our video.

Production: DAY 1 EDITING

Today we started by looking at all the clips, getting rid of all the ones we don't need and organising them in order to begin the editing process.

Before we actually began editing we realised neither of us had the song on mp3, so we quickly downloaded it to get along with editing and lipsync the song with the clips.

We planned out before hand what shot would start the video off and how it would continue so that already in itself makes the editing process much simpler for us.

We started our video off with these clips.

Just goes to show that with good planning you've got half the work done!

We began marking the beat, and added a base track. Then, added all the clips for the first 30 seconds of the song and started cutting and rearranging them. After having edited the first few shots, we got to the first chorus, the editing involved speed changes and cuts. It was quite hard to get the speed changes right,  we wanted to make the beginning of the chorus when the artist grabs the old photo of Portobello a little faster to make it look a little more realistic.

We decided that the clip on the right hand top corner would be the basetrack.

We got most of our editing done really quickly, so i think we we will have LOADs of time to make little changes and make it PERFECT!

Towards the end (well 3/4 of it) of our music video we realised we wanted to use the reverse effect. We didn't really know how to do this on Final cut pro so we youtubed it and realised its more simple than we thought. (: We were ecstatic when we saw how great it looked and how well it complemented the lyrics!

Production: All Filming Photographs

We have finished filming and although have created individual posts for each of the filming days with a few comments, videos and photographs, we have put together an autumn themed clip with all filming day behind the scenes photographs!

Customize your own slideshow

PRODUCTION: Skills Development

My AS production was not very well planned as we made most things up on the spot; this was obviously not a good idea because it was very time consuming to come up with ideas while filming. This was bad as we only had the equipment for a certain number of days. This encouraged me to plan better for this years production, which is something we did do.

We concentrated alot on the focus (which, through doing the AS production, I found to be VERY important), the camera shots/angles, and the lighting.


PLANNING PROCESS:

1. Our planning begun with researching about similar artists to Ellie Goulding (i.e. Pixie Lott and Little Boots) and incorporating some of the ideas that they use in their music video into ours, such as the costume and location types. This was the basis of the planning for our music video.

2. We then looked up different locations that would complement the song and the mood that the song is trying to convey. Alia was in charge of finding the locations and she found places that were very effective and matching to the mood of the song: Richmond, Portobello Road and New River Walk.

3. We then listened to our song choice over and over again to come up with ideas that we could incorporate into our music video. I think this was a good planning method as it allowed us all to envision ideas and share them with each other. We came up with many ideas this way.

4. We begun to storyboard our ideas and get a clearer idea of what we are going to do, including the shot types and angles. After doing this we knew exactly what we wanted to do, which saved us alot of time while filming.

PRODUCTION: Last Minute Ideas For Our Music Video

We knew exactly what shots we wanted before we started filming. However as we travelled to our chosen locations we came across other places (i.e. Astey's Row Rock Garden) and so we altered some of our planning as we decided it would be better for our music video. The same thing happened with the costume for our artist. We knew exactly what we wanted our artist to wear but as we came across the extra locations we decided on having extra costumes, so there were many costume changes.

A few of the many costume changes we had

Production: Skills Developement

The planning and production of this music video has changed from our As Coursework production. The filming techniques, preparation, research, location selection, skills, and ideas have all improved substantially and developed well since we began.

We started off researching, looking at different music videos by both well-known and new artists. We each drew up a list of ideas and discussed them. We made decisions but in the preparation stages we kept our eyes open in case we saw things that would help us with the video and ideas. We did a good amount of research, as opposed to the previous year, and that really shows in our blog and our video.

We prepared well too, we had a clear plan of the shots and locations that we were going use and where it would be placed in the video. Our location selections changed too (from As), we researched the kind of places that are used for that genre but tried to select some that had good features and would stand out, as we aren't really using that many props, with the main ones being the picture frames that will be seen hanging off the trees branches.

In terms of filming techniques, we have used a wider variety of angles and lengths that make our work look   stronger and more effective, they keep the viewer interested and watching. With the thriller we didn't really put that much thought into the exact angles, and consequently it wasn't as capturing for the audiences as it could have been. With the the music video we had thought it all through, we made a story board with the main shots, angles, and lengths each with a reason and purpose.

With movies and footage such as the thriller opening, the main thing is what is on screen so people are going to have to watch it. Music videos are just there to accompany the music, a selling point, so we need to do something different that people will enjoy watching while listening to the song instead of opting to just listen to the song.

Production: SKILLS DEVELOPMENT

All our skills have definitely improved immensely from last year. Our research, planning and production have all improved.

When we came to researching for ideas for our music video, this time around it much more thorough. I personally think it has to do with the fact that we have to research music videos, something which we all do nearly everyday so it was more interesting for us. We looked at all kinds of videos, not just song that we listen to but other genres that use techniques that we want to use. We took everything much more seriously like looking at a wide variety of artists similar to our inspiration, ELLIE GOULDING, and also different artists that dressed like her such as PIXIE LOTT and DIANA VICKERS. 

Before AS as a lot of us were used to, either filming any kind of video in college, or haven't filmed before at all. So when it came to looking for locations we didn't really branch very far. That made us realise this year that if we wanted to have a good video we would have to venture further for locations. This made us look for a wide range if locations which we felt that worked with our video, however we had to narrow a lot of them down because there were so many. 

We saw a lot of previous student music videos and to be completely honest we weren't all that impressed with them so we wanted to make sure ours actually looked somewhat like a music video, and for this it requires a lot of costumes changes and interesting props. In comparison to last year when really we only used the basic props like a phone or gloves, we wanted to step outside the box and use more interesting things like frames and photos.

In terms of camera shots, compared to last year, they were much more dynamic as a music video is meant to capture the viewers attention. Last year we just used the basic along with a few interesting ones, however this year we have a lot more knowledge about media, it's portrayal by the public and what kind of elements suit what and when.