Digipak and magazine advertisement Photos

I have decided to take 4 different photos for my digipak
 1) The whole band standing with a black back drop behind them.
 2) the singer sat on a bar by the river.
 3) the weir in Worcester
 4) a photo being burned. For my magazine advertisement I am again going to use the band standing against a black back drop, but have them in different positions or maybe holding their instruments.

Response to chef examiners blog

I have been reading Pete's Blog posts about 'Death of the Album'. I think that the album is now an ageing way to purchase music. I think this because in today's technologically filled environment there is no need to go to a shop and buy an album when you can get it on your phone. I also think that the album its self is going to die out as, due to the ability of buying individual songs, there is going to be less demand for full albums. The way that some artists combat this is to only make the songs available if you buy the album. http://petesmediablog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/death-of-album-part-1.html I also had a go at making some album covers using the tips he gave. http://petesmediablog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/death-of-album-part-2.html

first practise at digipak

This is my very basic first practise at a digipak. My first impressions are that it is going to take a lot of work to perfect my own work to achieve a very high standard. I will do this by using a lot of the Photoshop tutorials available to me form the internet. This will help as I can give my finished digipak the realistic touches.

Digipak research

Digipaks are different from what they used to be. Due to the increase in digital downloads digipaks are now for serious fans of the artist and what to show their dedication by buying a hard copy to have and to hold. All of the Digipaks that I have researched are from bands in a similar genre and, therefore, have a similar target audience. The key conventions of these digipaks (apart from Biffy Clyro) are that they have a photo of the whole band. This will appeal to the audience because they will feel more of a connection with the band than if they had just bought the digital version. Other things that they have in common is the use of interesting imagery, this makes the pack look a lot more appealing. The Killers, as it is a greatest hits album, have written a thank you message to all their fans and their support. When I come to doing my digipak I want to include these conventions but I will have to remember that my band is not as mainstream as the bands that I have researched. This doesn’t mean that I can’t stick to most of the conventions, if anything it means I can bend them and intend to do this by using more landscape photos of the singer to give the audience a sense of loneliness about the artist (maybe something like Eminem’s Recovery album). I will use the band photo as I think that is important to the genre.

risk assessment

Pre Production casting

Guitarist(1) Matt
Guitarist(2) Trent
Drummer (3) Rory
Singer (4) Freddy

  (1)Matt
  (2)Trent
  (3)Rory
  (4)Freddy

Storyboard

For my storyboard I have decided to do an animatic, like the one one shown in this Youtube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7wXWFGKFJo

The reason I have decided to do this is because, it will give me a clear view of what my finished product should look like. It also allows me to gain good editing skills and so that when I come to post production I wont be  messing around figuring out what looks good as I will already know.

Target audience- Facebook

I have started a Facebook group asking them about what they would want from a music video 

Music Video and Redundancy/Entropy

Redundancy: is that which is predictable or conventional in a message. Redundancy is the result of high predictability. Redundancy is not merely a useful tool in communication, it is absolutely vital. A degree of redundancy is essential to practical communication. Entropy: unpredictability A text is entropic if it contains unpredictable elements. From watching the music videos of Taylor Swift, Yo La Tengo and OK Go, I found this: 1) Taylor Swift: Uses more of redundancy features to appeal to her mainstream audience. Although she does uses minor entropic features to make her videos look cooler. e.g. a dancing teddy bear. 2) Yo La Tengo: They are way more towards the entropic end of the spectrum in that in their video sugarcube they are at a school of rock but it is a classroom with a guy in KISS attire teaching them.

Green Screen

Today we tested the use of green screen and how to use it. I learnt how to delete the back drop so that the person we recorded looks like they are swimming. This is what we made: we leant that if we record to close to the green screen the reflection will bounce onto the person creating the pixel effect in the video.

Research into the song 'Colder' by Harbor

I got a few ideas for songs that I would like to make a music video for. One of them is 'Colder' by Harbor. I like them on Facebook so I messaged then saying this:

Goodwin Research 4

Music videos are essentially promotional devices whose function is to sell the song to its target audience. For example in 'Bite My Tongue' by You Me At Six (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1CTbE3u0PQ). The audience will want to see guitars, Drums, Close Ups of the singer and them all preforming.

As an artist is a brand they have to have an identity established through their videos. In this video you could say that the band are trying to break away from their identity from the fun rebellious rock group (shown in the first image below ) to the darker and heavier rock band (image under the first one).

 To appeal to their target market, record lables will demand close ups of the stars for their audience to recognise with. They do this by collaborating with Oli Sykes (lead singer of Bring me the Horizon). In the video Oli is used as a threat so is given a lot of close ups and is in control of the editing.

Goodwin Research 1

Goodwin said that music videos demonstrate genre characteristics (e.g. stage performance in metal videos, simple dance routine for boy/ girl bands, aspiration in hip hop). I researched into Soft Rock bands and what conventions are the same between a selection of videos. this is what I found: 

- A lot of close ups of instruments and faces.

- have a narrative structure to them 

- they tend to interact more with the audience (eg looking into the camera) 

Some soft rock music videos: 

Carole King 

http://youtu.be/m8KlYc0xG80

Elton John 

http://youtu.be/mTa8U0Wa0q8

Fleetwood Mac

http://youtu.be/kyE4CLM0QIA

Stop Motion animation

Busted Music Video - First Experience

For my first task in A2 media, I had to try to perfect the art of lip syncing and creating a short music video in preparation for next year’s course work. I did this by creating a lip sync of Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQW9X5-0HBs) and re-producing the first 1 minute and 16 seconds of Busted’s ‘What I go to School for’ music video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RavXyTHVUe8&list=LLJjl4Q3puVGOYuVcaIwADsg&feature=mh_lolz).

As I was the director I had to set every member of my group with a role, from props and costume to being in control of the camera. This wasn’t that hard as everyone didn’t mind what part they had to play, so I was able to designate a role to every group member. With this everything came back to me for a final check. When the story board was handed to me it was good because it had all the requirements that a story board needs (shots, times, lyrics, cinematography). I was in charge of doing the shot list which, in hindsight, I should have got someone else with less to do to complete because I had a lot of work looking over and helping other people that the shot list was rushed and we had to change it on set. One of the tasks that the whole group got involved with was creating a Facebook page asking people to be the class and the crowed outside. This didn’t work as we were shooting on the Wednesday and set the page up on the Monday, so most people were already busy. If we had more time though I feel that this method would have been effective. The final part of the planning for this video was to sort out props and costume, this was not done effectively as the person in charge of props and costume asked everyone to bring old school uniform, but only me and a couple of others did, so we didn’t have enough for a crowed.

I really enjoyed the production task because most of the time things ran smoothly and we managed to get the shots we needed in time with the shot list. However as in every production things are going to  wrong, the main thing being continuity. This happened a lot in the classroom scenes, as we were using people who don’t do Media, so they were available for some of the shots but not for others. When I come to do my real music video I will try to use as few people as possible and if I do need a lot of people make sure I get all the shots on the day that everyone is there, this way I won’t have to reschedule to do one shot. This happened when we were outside and in one shot we have a crowed of 6ft tall guys and in the next shot we have 3 girls. Despite this I do think that we did well in the production and stuck to our time table.

While we were in production we did use a number of Digital Technology. One of which was, of course, the Digital Camera. Without the use of the digital camera I would not have been able to get the quality of picture that we did.  Another use of digital technology was to use the projector to play the video for the lighting and also for the sound so that the actors could sing along.

At the editing stage I learned a lot of new techniques, as I have never used Adobe Premier Plus. Even basic things like trimming a clip I improved on and was able to get the clip exactly how I wanted (in the end).

I also learned how to finalise a clip to make the video flow better. The red bar at the top means the video hasn’t been finalised and creates a jumpy image, which looks really bad. 

I found that in a few of the shots the lighting was to dark so I used the shadow/highlight tool which made the shots brighter so that we could see the actor singing.


The other useful tool that I found was the unlink tool which meant that we could unlink the sound from the video, this was a benefit because it meant that we could  the real music from the song played instead of our dreadful singing.

In all I feel that I have had a good experience in my first attempt at a music video but I will need to take the thing that I did wrong in to consideration when I come to my final piece and learn from the mistakes that I made in this experience.

First Post

Hello,
I am Kieran Nixon. I am studying at Worcester Sixth Form College in my A2 year. I am using blogger for my media course work.
Thank you for looking.