Finished!

We are really pleased with our final finished music video, and have really enjoyed creating it!

Evaluation Question 4

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

media evaluation #2

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Media Evaluation #1

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

My Poster (+ Poster Research)

This is the poster that i based my own poster on contrasted with my own poster. I found this when researching different posters and found that it was exactly like the one i was imagining.  I decided to use the same picture on the front of my poster and Digi Pak as I thought this would be the most effective in the way that many people would see the poster and then instantly recognize or link it to the CD. I also kept all of my text to the center to make it more clear, and used the same fonts as my digi pak. Overall i am really pleased with the result as i feel that my ancillary tasks all fit well with each other and the music video.
 

My Digi Pak

I have created my own Digi Pak to go alongside my music video, which i created in Photoshop.  Here is my front cover and back cover. I chose to do this in black and white because i thought it was quite simple and allowed the viewer to focus on the writing on the CD, and also links in with the 'home movie effect' of the music video. I took the photo of the eye with the leaf surrounding it because I wanted an interesting and different front cover using a photograph. In Photoshop I put the noise level up to 20% , just like the music video. This creates an old movie effect which also links in with the flashbacks, relating the ancillary tasks to the main music video. I also used the leaf idea all of the way through the ancillary tasks by photographing a leaf skeleton because I decided it on it as a theme. I was subtly making the link between the dead leaf and the alive one, relating it back to the music video idea. I used DaFont.com to find my font, and i used one called 'Blue Noon' all the way through my ancillary tasks because i thought it looked like an illustration and fits well with the look i am going for. I added a bar code, symbols and text to the back cover because this is what i found was on many of the backs of the CD covers i researched. I also gave a website link. Overall i am very pleased with my Front and Back cover and i think they relate well to the Band and the music video.

This is the inside of my Digi Pak, and as you can see i decided on a colour theme and also a photo theme of leaves. I have written the lyrics on the inside page because many CD's seem to do that. I have also added a middle section on both the front and inside that says Of Monsters and Men Little Talks.

Overall i am really pleased with my finished Digi Pak because i feel that it relates well to the music video, whilst showing the personality and target audience of the band.

This is my original image that i used for the front cover, before i edited it on Photoshop. You can see the difference in the colour and grain.

CD back covers

Here are a selection of CD back covers that i have looked at. I really like the one with the central font and think i will emulate that for my own back cover. Researching these was really helpful and i have learnt a lot. By looking at these i have found that there are many different ways of laying out the text and image. I love the Wombats CD layout and the way that the image is using a photo within a photo technique is really interesting and has an eye catching effect. Rihanna's album uses a faded picture so that you can focus more on the writing and not be distracted by the image. The beatles album back cover is one that i really like as it has half the page as the image and half the page as the writing and i think this is an interesting and well thought out technique. Overall looking at these CD covers has been really helpful and i have learnt what to put on the back, for example the bar code, and logo's of the company.

Digi Pak Research

After looking at several Digi Paks, i have decided that the similarities between them are that they all have a  continuous colour scheme, and everything goes together well. For example, Rihanna's album has red lipstick and red hair, and inside she has a photograph of her lying in a bed of red roses. On the CD there is a rose. They all link together. Same with The Script's album. This is something i will take in to consideration when designing my own Digi Pak.

A DigiPak

Digipacks are a type of CD packaging that can flip open like a book, or can have three parts, so that one portion of the packaging opens to the right and one to the left with the CD in the centre. Usually, the portion of the digipack that hold the CD is made of plastic like a traditional jewel case CD - the plastic part is simply attached to the paper background.

Digipacks were first created by MeadWestvaco, and their product, Digi-Pak is trademarked. As the format became more popular and began to be used by more manufacturers, the generic "digipack" came to be used to describe all soft CD packaging. The pros and cons are that they look nice, and many bands and labels like to use them for aesthetic reasons. The three section digipack sleeves opens up more design options because there is more room. However, they're more expensive than traditional liner notes and jewel cases. Digipacks can be more environmentally friendly than jewel cases because they can be made of recycled paper - however, they aren't always in fact made in this way. Also, Digipacks don't crack like jewel cases do, but they will rip and eventually the paper begins to peel apart and separate.

After looking at different types of digi pak, i have decided to create my digi pak similar to the one at the top, the "Boards of Canada" album. I have decided to do this because i feel it's more simple than having many bits to fold out, and so maybe is more eye catching/interesting. 

OUR FINISHED MUSIC VIDEO!

This is our FINISHED MUSIC VIDEO! We are both so pleased with the result, and have really enjoyed the process of creating it. There are obviously some little things that i would change now it is finished but overall i am so pleased and love the message we have managed to convey. For example, i would probably make the flashbacks more obvious although i do like the effect as it is. I really love the quick shot changes and think this creates a great effect.

Finished editing

This second clip is from the finished edit. We have finished our editing and are now colour correcting the different clips to represent past and present. We have chosen to turn the past clips or 'memories' to a blue/purple colour and add some noise (20%) so there is a clearer difference between the two times. Also the blue connotes an unhappy mood and she is unhappy because he is no longer here.

Little Talks Process

Here is a exported version of our music video during the editing process. We have editied over 50% but have some areas still to fill. We have not colour corrected this video yet either, as we will do that at the end. We still have a blank area at 6.45 and we are finding this a challenging area to fill because we do not want the video to become repetitive.

Editing

We have started the editing process of our music video now. It has taken us a while to get the hang of Adobe Premiere Pro but now we understand what we are doing it is a lot easier. We have put the song in and are editing the clips together. We have decided that because the song is very fast paced we will keep the clips short and flashing to go with this tempo.

This is a screen shot from the editing process. We have now edited just over half of our film together. We have tried really hard to fit the visual image to the rhythm and lyrics. Because of this it has taken a lot longer to edit than we originally thought. We are sticking with the fast and flashing theme of the video clips and have decided to weave in an out of present and past in a dream like way. So far there is a pattern of clips relating to the song chorus/bridge/verse etc. I think it is good to have a pattern because it makes more sense in the viewers mind, especially when the video is quite abstract like ours is.

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The Filming

Now we have decided on a song, a theme, an idea and an audience we were able to film the footage we needed by refering to our storyboard. We filmed on two seperate occasions, and have now got all the footage we need so have started the editing process. I am really pleased with the footage we have got, filming in places such as graveyards, fields and on a bedroom set up.

Emailing the Manager

Before we made our music video, we had to email the manager of Of Monsters And Men to ask permission to use the song. This is because we did not create the song ourselves and have no right to use the song. Here is the email that we sent to the Manager:

From: Poppy Dodgson
Sent: 09 November 2012 12:09
To: heather@esjamanagement.com
Subject: Of Monsters and Men- Little Talks use

Dear Heather,

We are two Media Studies students at Chew Valley School. We are making a music video as part of our A Level advanced porfolio in media and were wondering if we could use Little Talks by Of Monsters and Men as the soundtrack for our music video.

The video would only be for our coursework and not used for any commercial purposes.

Please could you let us know.

Thanks,

Poppy Dodgson and Louise Storer at Chew Valley School, Chew Lane, Bristol, BS40 8QB

Summary of Music Video Research

Now we have finished our research of Music Videos, we have decided to focus on 'Home' by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and 'Video Games' by Lana Del Ray. Both these videos have got a similar theme running through them, as they are both made up of clips of 'old times' or memories, with a home video feel to them. This creates a really interesting effect and is something that we want to take forward with our own music video. After looking at the music videos we have listed some codes and conventions we want to include to make our video the best it can be:

Codes: The codes of our music video will be to maybe have a deeper or underlying meaning.
Conventions: The conventions of our music video will include a strong storyline, instead of just dancing around etc. We are also going to have two main characters

Our music video's song will be by the band 'Of monsters and Men' and is called 'Little Talks'. We chose this song because it is a really upbeat song which can appear to be happy, but when you listen to the lyrics you realise that it is a very sad song. This is something we want to portray throughout the music video, using flashbacks of a happier time whilst the present is sad. So, we are going to tell the story of a woman who's husband has died, and she is slowly going mad over the course of the video, thinking she can hear his voice. She is having flashbacks throughout the video, and these will be in a 'home video' format to create the effect of memories.

The genre of our music video will be a 'hybrid genre' which is a mixture of many different genres put together. The genres includes indie, rock and pop themes. The general genre of Little Talks (song and video) would be said to be indie as it is not a typical pop song. However there are small themes of the pop genre and also rock too.

The target audience for our music video will be for more intelligent and involved people, who are interested in music videos, moving image and music. The video's aimed at young adults and teenagers who have a strong understanding and interest in these types of things, however people that are not overly involved but simply like the song can still appreciate the video.

The purpose of the music video is to entertain and interest people, as well as intregue them in to listening to the lyrics of the song and becoming emotionally involved in the ideas behind it.

Script

This is the script for the main task. Because we are doing a music video to a song, this made it quite tricky for us to create a script. What we have done is written up the lyrics, and then added the diagetic and non diagetic sound in to that using colour coding. This will help us clearly see when we must film a flash back, or when the woman needs to sing a line. It also is clearer now what actions we are filming and when these are so we can see what we need to film on the day.

Storyboard

For our main task we had to create a storyboard of what we are going to show in our music video. This is going to be very useful because when we are filming our music video we can refer to this plan so we do not forget any shots or parts of the music video.

StoryBoard of 'Little Talks' from lOUstor_1234_

Video Games- Lana Del Ray

This is Lana Del Ray's music video for 'Video Games'. This music video interests me because it has an 'old home video' effect. This is something that we would like to incorporate in to our music video because it is a really nice effect. Lana Del Ray's music video has lots of clips of events that have happened in history, almost like flashbacks. These are constrasted with clips of lana singing to the camera, still with a old movie feel to them.