EVALUATION

Final Music Video

Final inside cover of digipak

We have now put the final few images onto the inside of our digipak and it is complete. We used a series of pictures of knives which are used in the self-harming scene in our music video. We used the knives in the same way as we used arms in the website and on the front of the CD cover by repeating the image to emphasise the danger and darkness of it. This highlights how we have kept the same theme throughout.
This is now finished.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Advanced Portfolio Critical Evaluation.

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

        Screamo music derives from post hard core music, so it has a heavy sound but also has emotional lyrics. For our music video we did quite a lot a research into similar bands that were similar to ours. For example bands like Enter Shikari, A Day to Remember, My Bloody Valentine, Alexisofire and Paramore. We have challenged the genre by adding elements not normally associated with it but also work with the storyline appropriately. In screamo videos, you wouldn’t normally think of a one scenes being set in a park. We used this as it works well with storyline and one of the main scenes take part in this location. We also used the theme of isolation, which is sometimes used in this genre. The stalker girl is appears on her own in most of the scenes, so this highlights it. One of the phrases from the song is ‘No remorse’ is used throughout the song. We took this as a starting point to form different ideas. Our main idea was to create an obsessed stalker, who eventually kills the lead singer. To our audience it will show them the effect the band has on the stalker and how the things that she does, tells us more about her obsession, such as her tribute wall of them in her bedroom. We also wanted the audience to wonder what’s going to happen next and why has this girl got such an obsession with the band. As screamo music is known for its dark lyrics accompanied with deep and heavy sounds, we thought we should use scenes that would capture this. A really prominent scene is when the stalker girl cuts her arm in the shape of the bands’ name. We did this because it highlights the seriousness of the song and creates a stronger visual element.

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

        The main theme and image that we have kept throughout our project is dark and mystic. We have the clear image of an obsessed stalker and they are constantly there within our products. In the video we see the girl self-harming on her arm with a knife. From this we had the idea of using lots of arms to make up the headings on our website and the background is made up of the lyrics of the song repeated to show the possession and protectiveness the girl feels over the band. The lyrics being in red also represent the blood from the girls arm. The crying eyes of the girl at the end of the video are used on the back of the digipak design and also on the actual CD design. On the inside are the blades of the knife that she used to cut herself with. The same fonts, Imprint MT Shadow and Baskerville Old Face are both used in the website and on the CD cover in either red or white. All of the images on our digipak design and those integrated into our website are all relevant to the video as they all make an appearance in it at least once. Our target audience are teenagers and people in the early twenties who are from the emo/scene cliché, mainly males. The red, black and white colours are what they would usually wear and it suits the tone and mood of the song. The website, CD cover and video will be instantly aesthetically pleasing to them.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts (CD cover & Webpage)?

        In both our website and CD cover we have kept them both the same by using a consistent font style and the same images. On our website we have used images of ‘arms’ to highlight the girl cutting hers in the video. This is also used as the front for our CD cover, so audience can identify the website with this. Another element we used on the CD came from the video, which is a close up of the stalker girls’ eyes. On our website we have featured the logo of the band which represents them and their style, and so that people will instantly recognise them. Also we have used new media technology like Facebook and twitter, so the audience can easily access the bands on these websites. We did this by making sure that these were visible across our homepage. Also to promote the bands’ single, we posted a sneak peak of the artwork on our site. Our CD cover and website were both created with dark colours like blood red and black. To contrast this we used white writing and gothic style fonts to highlight the difference between them. This is also featured throughout both of these to keep the theme flowing. Another thing is that our background shows the bands lyrics over and over. We did this because we think that it was a nice touch to the website and the something that the audience can further associate the band with. We chose these colours because they appear often in our music video. The blood red idea came from the girl cutting her arm. This colour is used as a font for the lyrics featured on the homepage. We also used black with this red font to create and under layer background which makes the writing visible and interesting.

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

        For the construction of our music video, we used iMovie. This allowed us to import our footage, cut it down and put it in a suitable order. We could edit to the beat as we were able to import our MP3 version of the song onto the program. iMovie also allowed us to add effects onto our shots. We added a black and white grainy effect onto the shots of the band performing and also cropped these down so as to get rid of any unnecessary or unwanted space around them. We then used a lighting tool to edit some of the outside storyline shots as some of these ended up being quite. As we’d both used it previously, iMovie was easy and simple to use. We used Photoshop on the digipak design which was rather difficult to use at first but once we got the hang out it we found it particularly easy to use. Neither of us really liked iWeb, we didn’t feel it had many good resources and we felt very limited in what we could do. Even though we are happy with the way our website turned out in the end, we would have preferred it to look a lot more professional than it does. In research and planning we used YouTube a lot so as to see similar bands videos and to apply some of their elements to our unsigned band’s video. We can now distribute our video through YouTube and our blog. The band will also help with this by posting it on their Facebook and Myspace pages.

Safina and Siobhan :)

First lesson back after Christmas!

This is our first lesson back after Christmas- the edited video deadline is on Tuesday and the website, digipak and evaluation is in for next Thursday.

Today we have been adding editing touches to our video. It is completed in the sense that there are no more shots to be cut or added and the whole song is filled with video. However, now we are editing shots by adding special effects to them. Some of the outside shots are quite dark so we have made them lighter,  we have changed the shots of the band performing to a grainy black and white effect as we thought it gave a better feel to the song. We have then cropped some of the band performance shots to get rid of any pointless and unwanted space around them.

We have also been working on our website. We were told by our teacher that only a homepage was needed when all along we had been working on 3/4 pages. We have now cut this down now though to one  page and we think we have all the basics and essentials on it that is needed.
Here is a print screen of our finished website.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Digipak design.

Today we started our digipak design. We kept the theme of hands from the website and we used a close-up of a pair of eyes to resemble the stalker girl's eyes in our video. We also kept the colour scheme the same with red and black to coincide with our original theme that is within the website. We kept the same fonts as the website.
Here is a print screen of what we have done so far.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Website design.

Our headings for our website are to appear on the arms of a person.

This is what we have done so far in Photoshop. The top arm will have the name of the band on it and the bottom one will have links to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The other three will present either gig dates, influences or the music video we have produced. I will next paste this image onto iWeb to take up the whole page.

We chose to have arms as a theme as in our video the stalker girl cuts into her arms in the intro.

Siobhan :)

Today's editing.

Today I filled in a lot of the walking shots with performance shots as this was pointed out to us last lesson for being too long. Now we have cut down the walking a considerable amount and it looks a lot better.

This screen grab shows the clips highlighted in blue which are now, not just walking shots but performance shots too. This shows how much walking we have cut out and replaced with the bands performance.

Now the whole song is full of clips and is practically finished giving us a bit more extra time to work on the website and CD cover.

Siobhan :)

Audience feedback

Today in our class we were given the chance to look at each others music videos so far and evaluate them

We got mainly 'good' for music video with two 'basic' and one 'excellent' for each of the points on the evaluation sheet.

The comments were 'some shots too long', 'narrative wasn't clear' and 'too much walking'. 

We are currently working on the too much walking point and hoping to put in some performance shots to fill this up.

This week we have filled the whole length of the song with shots in a suitable order, so it is just a case of shortening shots down and adding more performance in. 

It was suggested to us that we should do a bit of extra filming to make the narrative more clear however this seems unlikely with Christmas coming up as many of the band members will be busy or away for the festive period and it will be very difficult to get them all together at one time. It also seems too late to film now as we only have 4 lessons left before the deadline in January- it has been extended as we missed a weeks worth of media lessons due to the snow- it will create a lot of pressure to get these shots edited and put suitably into the video in time. 

The screen grab at the top is of our video so far and the clips that have been highlighted in blue are the ones that are solely of the band walking, this is what we need to shorten down and add the bands performance in to. It is 6 shots worth of walking and next time we blog we will have hoped to have shorten this down considerably.

Siobhan :)

Today is the first time we've been able to edit due to bad weather conditions. As the college was closed all of last week, we weren't able to book out equipment to shoot new material. The deadline for our music video has been extended to the 11th of January, so hopefully we'll be able to get the new material.

In the lesson i've shortened some of the clips down to go with the tempo of the music. I did this by using extra footage of the band practice and pasting them between the previous clips.

Safina :)

Band performance taster

Today we edited the main band sequence to coordinate with the music. We used several close ups of each member performing, and then a medium long shot of them all together. We need to do more beat editing to  go with the pace of the song.  

 

Intro of our music video

Here is the intro to our music video. We are really happy that we have got the first part of our video done as we are finally getting somewhere. It's good because it fits directly with the intro and finishes just before the vocals come in.   

Siobhan Drake & Safina Frankson

Filming is over!

On sunday we filmed the last of our music video. This was the second time we had to shoot so we could finish the band performing and getting close up shots of them. Also we needed to re-shoot the part where heather cries as the lighting was too dark, and the part where she rips down the tribute wall.

We've just finished importing the rest of our footage and have about 28 minutes of it. As we shot the band performing the song individually, the amount of footage we have has shot up.

We worried a lot about the filming as the guitarist was 40 minutes late for filming. This was problematic as we didn't know when he was going to turn up and there was a chance that we would have had to film again if he didn't. If this had of happened, it wouldn't of been fair to ask the band to bring all their equipment for just a couple of shots.


Safina & Siobhan :)  

Film Notice

This is the notice we used whilst filming on the park last week. It explains why we needed to film and to notify members of the general public that we'd be using the park for a bit.


Safina & Siobhan :)

Website design

Today we've been working on our website. We made background on Photoshop of the lyrics of A Graceful Descent's song- No Remorse repeated over and over. We are now planning to create logo with the band's name cut into an arm. Arms will be a repetitive theme on our website, using them for the titles and sub-titles.
This is our early attempt of our final website.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Weather report for Sunday 21st November

We are planning to re-shoot this coming Sunday, even though what we need to shoot is all inside- the garage performance and some of Heather's tribute wall scenes, the camera will need to be outside for the garage part so that we can see the whole of the band performing together.
The forecast is white cloud which is relatively similar to what we had when filming last Sunday so we should be able to work with this type of weather. This forecast is from the BBC website.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Review of Sunday 14th November's shoot

We had our first film on Sunday 14th November. It went relatively well and we got quite a lot filmed- most of the story line anyway. However, we did have some difficulties.  We did want each member of the band- apart from the lead singer to sing a line of the breakdown. ("I'M GOING DOWN, YOU'RE COMING WITH ME.") However, none of them were too confident to do it so we had to change it so the lead singer sung it instead.
We then filmed Heather, the stalker girl in the bedroom with the tribute wall. But looking back at the footage we think we may have to re-shoot some of the scenes. The one where she runs into the room and rips down the posters off the wall is not done as aggressively as we would like and our extreme close-up of her crying is too dark.
Once we got round to filming the performance aspect of the video we found it was too dark to see the band properly in the garage so we are needing to re-shoot on Sunday to do this as long as we can get hold of the equipment.

This is a short clip of what we filmed of Heather in the bedroom. It isn't fully edited yet but it is on here to give a feel of how our video is coming along and to show the few shots that we will need to re-shoot at the weekend.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Updated weather forecast

Here's another weather report from the BBC closer to the shoot- it's still set to be sunny on Sunday!

Siobhan :)

Weather forecast for Sunday 14th November

We are planning on doing our first lot of filming this Sunday- the 14th so we thought it would be a good idea to check the weather reports in order to be able to know for sure whether we could do our outside location shots or not.
Here we have to print screen shots of weather reports, one for the BBC and one from ITV, these tell us that it is due to be sunny on Sunday which is good news to us. We shall post another further on in the week, closer to the shoot to check that nothing has changed for us.

BBC

ITV

Siobhan and Safina :)

Production of our website

This is the start in the production of our website for our band. We're not too happy with it at the moment as it doesn't very professional  but we're hoping to improve this. Hopefully when we shoot on sunday we'll get a wider variety of shots to use on the website.

Safina & Siobhan