Final cut

Untitled from Jack Jarvie on Vimeo.

Magazine advert

Digipak

4 panels of the digipak

Evaluation Question 4

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

Media technologies/equipment used:

• YouTube
• Facebook
• Sony Handycam
• Sony Cyber Shot camera
• Dafont.com
• Photoshop CS4
• Final Cut Express

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Receiving feedback from our target market was extremely important to the success of our video. We used the comments made from class members, friends and our teacher to improve our video where necessary.

The first time we received feedback was from our teacher during our pitch to her. This was our first real start to our video, when we were just planning what could feature. We explained the idea's we had for the video so far and how they would link in with each line and the song it's self. We received positive feedback on the individual ideas that could feature in the video, and those ideas eventually did feature.

However our teacher told us we had no real base point and no real meaning of what the video was going to be about, we had a poor structure. We had lot's of little idea's that would look good, but nothing to really spin from those small ideas. So after our pitch we researched and researched and brain stormed some idea's for what the main base for our video could be about.

We came up with the idea of cyber bullying as the main theme of our video, it is a big issue in today's current society and something we thought we could reflect in the video and would work well with the song choice.

Click here for the feedback from our pitch

I constructed some research of my own to our target market before we started filming, myself and the group knew we had some rough idea's that could possibly work very well, however I wanted to make sure that our target audience agreed with our ideas. For example the use of black and white and also if they would mind if the video did not include the band/singer who's song it was. I gave the questionnaire

out to 10 people aged between 16 - 19. If I got a lot of conclusive no's back from our target market I think we would of had to re think our video's story and it's structure. The questionnaire results were very positive, 8/10 of the people asked wouldn't mind if the video did not include the band/singer who's song it was, and also 7/10 people wouldn't mind if the video was in black and white. If I had received the questionnaires back and they would prefer to see the band who's song it was, then myself and the group would certainly have to think about getting a local band involved and possibly produce a performance video.

Questionnaire research click here.

The next time we received feedback was after the screening of rough cut to our Media classmates, they wrote down what they thought of the video, what they liked and what they disliked. This feedback really helped us in the construction of our main product, as you can probably tell!

After the screening of the rough cut myself and my group members looked through the comments that we had been given, the main comment made was about the many gaps we still had left in the video, this prompted us to go back to our locations and film a lot more footage. Classmates enjoyed the argument scene, they thought the hand-held camera scenes were very effective and life like and they also thought the pace of the editing fitted the music well.

Link to the rough cut feedback click here.

The next time we received feedback was after we showed media students and friends of the group our final video. Asking media students fortheir feedback of our video was particularly useful, they themselves are obviously doing the same thing to us, so receiving their feedback on editing techniques, colours, and the pace of the editing and music at certain times was very helpful.

What they enjoyed:

• They enjoyed the storyline of the video
• They thought that the use of cross dissolves and cuts were used in the right places at the right time
• They enjoyed how the editing linked in sync with the music, for example Claire running away, the start of the argument scene, and also the hand picking up the pills!
• They enjoyed the black and white imagery

What they didn't enjoy:

• The lighting in the suicide scene was different when Claire reached for the alcohol in the cupboard, it ruined the feeling of a dark and depressing situation

How could we improve the video?

• Feature the graveyard scenes more

After we interviewed our target market (the video is below) we also got them to fill in a booklet about the digipak and the magazine advert. We had already got the feedback from them over the video, however we wanted extra feedback on our ancillary tasks, after all a band's digipak and advert is really what attracts the customer to buy the products.

• In my opinion I feel that the way there are logos and representations of other companies on the magazine give it a very realisitic feel. Alongside his I would also say that the use of colours make the adertisement stand out. The text is very easy to read and the advert gives a lot of information without using a mass amount of text, keeping it simple was a very good idea.
• The magazine advert goes well with the CD cover. I like the way both images are quite dark and shady. I like the way the reviews lie (ie. star ratings) are below the images
• The magazine advert is similar to the CD cover, which creates synergy within the campaign. THe images are well edited and the text is easy on the eye.
• The layout is very professinal and the colours, fonts and lighting match the digipak creating a strong house theme. The professional touches such as the itunes and hmv logo work very well.
• I like the combingation f the dark background, suble images + light, clear, easy to read writing.
• Beautiful images, the upside down rose is distinctive and symbolic
• Maybe pictures better aligned.

• The digipak almost tells a story through the pictures used, I would say this is very good as it clearly builds from the music video. Again the use of logos make it look realistic and credible. It is kept very simple but at the same time very eye catching for the buyers. It definatley looks like an album to buy and keep.
• I like the saturation - could poss edit further?
• The dark imagery gives a hint as to the lyrical themes of the video. The sense of foreboding is conveyed through the open gates and tree shapes.
• Dark contrast makes it seem very gloomy and mysterious. I like the barcode positioned at the bottom right.
• The gothic theme indicates what the genre of the music will be.
• The use of dark low key ighting is amazing, the saturation of the pictures and lighting emphasise the message and tone of your vdeo. The front image works really well as it is a scene from the video and entices viewers as it does not give too much away. Also love the continual symbolism created by the rose
• I like how dramatic the pictures are. The front picture has mysterious elements that draws in audiences.
• The lighting makes it very atmospheric. The open gate draws you into the picture making you wonder what will happen next.
• Atmospheric - sets a sombre tone. Pictues are excellent, perhaps bottom right could have zoomend in on graves a bit more to distinguish it from bottom left.

After they completed their feedback myself and the group analyzed it to see where we could improve and what they enjoyed. The feedback we received was very positive and we were pleased to get back from our target market, however one person said we should edit the saturation on the panels of the digipak. After a lot of trials with different levels of saturation and getting the group's opinion on the matter, we decided to leave it how it was because the continuity would be ruined if we proceeded with the changes.

Below is our feedback video.

Untitled from Jack Jarvie on Vimeo.

We obtained further feedback by posting our video onto Facebook. This was very useful because it allowed us to show the video to a lot of people all in our target market age range in a very short amount of time. Also during my research into my target market I found out that they use Facebook a lot for social interaction between friends and also as a hobbie. The audience feedback from Facebook is below.

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation question

View more presentations from manufan93.

Digipak research

The Blueprint three

The digipak below is the Blue print 3 by Jay - Z, the genre for this digipak is obviously hip - hop. Although our genre is rock/indie, i love the house style and the continuity this album has, for example the red and white that runs through out. The back of the digipak is almost like an actual blueprint, with the lines and the random squares and rectangles placed around the song titles. The three red lines is something that run's through two of the four panels, I am fairly sure that this represents the three part, from the Blueprint three. This is an interesting technique that maybe we should consider when producing our digipak, having something significant that runs through our digipak.

Digipak research

Clubmix

This digipak is from Clubmix 2007. The house style is a very important feature in all of the digipak's i have viewed, when constructing our digipak we have to make sure this is a key feature. The obvious connotations from clubbing, is a very sexual one. Men dancing with women etc. So I think the under dressed appealing girls on the front cover are very suitable for the genre being advertised. The colours on the digipak appeal to a very wide audience, with the purples and the blues reflected through out the album, this is very wise to do, clubbing songs do appeal to both females and males, and they have been clever enough not to devote too much attention to one sex.

Digipak research

The Nightfly

When constructing my digipak research i really wanted a diverse mix of digipak's, and this one certainly is! It is an old swing album, with a lot of 60s - 70s music. The colour's certainly represent the genre and the date of this music, there are a lot of black and white's on the digipak. I love the old record player on the front cover with the cool traditional 60s guy. The inside of the digipak is surprisingly plain, it just has the blue page with the artist's name, also the actual CD itself is very plain, there is no extravagant graphics or images slapped onto the CD, again it's just the artists name and the album cover. The artist, Donald Fagen obviously wanted a very simple digipak to represent the style of music he was producing.

The back of the digipak was missing.

Bigger role for me

Originally I thought that my role in the video was going to be a fairly small one, with me just acting out happy scene's with Claire and then me posing in Facebook and my text message sending her abusive messages. However since filming some of the video and in discussion with the group, we have decided that I should take on a bigger role in the video. The main reason for this decision is because our song is fairly slow in parts, and after showing our teacher our rough cut video she gave us the idea of making the audience feel really gripped and emotional towards our video, and she really liked the idea of my character showing regret!

Final cut

Untitled from Jack Jarvie on Vimeo.

Final digipak

This is the group's final digipak that Alysha and Charlotte have produced together, i love the continuity between each panel, for example the use of the rose and the black and white theme! For the inside two panels we decided to use the graveyard, we originally wanted a really wide shot of the graveyard stretched across the two panels, but we couldn't get the right shot to fit in well enough, we decided to stick with the gates to the entry of the graveyard, the gates are a significant part in our video so I think this equally work's very well.

Links to the creators of the digipak's blog are below.

Alysha Bennett

Charlotte Bailey

Too many tutorials..

Myself and the group really wanted an effect that we have seen in many video's on the television. We wanted to make the whole of the clip black and white apart from one thing in the clip. The dying ambition for where we wanted this to happen was with the rose, we thought the dark black and white background in contrast to the luscious red rose would look outstanding! My self and Claire got onto YouTube to find a way of doing this in our video, we were looking for a straight forward video to guide us to this effect. What we found and used is below!

Magazine advertisement research

The parts of this advertisement i like is how the images match the text, for example "Written in the stars" matched with the galaxy of multi coloured starts around the artist. I also enjoy how the text keeps its continuity through out the advert with the Tinie Tempah and Disc - Overy in the same font, this adds to the brand identity that the record company are trying to create.

I also like the main image in the advert, the big bold picture of the artist is something i think really works, after all the advert is trying to promote and then eventually self the artist to the target market, i think this effect of presenting the artists in a big bold way is something we should consider during the production of our advert in the future.

The release date of the advert is very big and clear for the audience to see, this works on many levels, the whole purpose of the advert is to sell the artist and his new album to the target market, the release dates have to be big and bold for the market to see, this has to be a key area that we should reflect in our advert, it will add to the authenticity.

Magazine advertisement research

It is a very important process to look at existing media products to get some sort of idea to how we can influence ours to make it look as authentic as possible. This magazine advertisement is from Basement Jaxx which is a typical band that our target market listen to. The main things i like about this advertisement is the different types of fonts used through out the advert, the straight smart layout of "Congress Theater" and also "Friday November 6th 2009" adds a simplistic and stylish touch to this very busy advert.

I also like the main image in the advert, if you look closely it is a classic record with the main Basement Jaxx image in the middle of the record. There is a lot of colour in the main image which represents the type of up beat and disco vibe that their music has.

To make our advert look authentic as possible we must use some of the characteristics that this advert has used, what i mean by this is to use record label companies, their websites and also logos of the companies.

Risk assessment

This is the group's risk assessment that we have put together, we have identified the potential hazards in our locations and a way round it. Although we only film in about five or six locations the risk assessment is obviously still very important for the safety of the group and myself. However the potential risks that are in our specific locations are quite large.

Digipak planning

Charlotte and Alysha have taken the role to produce the digipak together, by producing two panels each. The rose in our video really is the focal point to our story, in our video Claire the loves and nourishes the rose, but after the brake up she uses the rose to symbolize her emotions against me, by ripping it up and throwing it on the floor! So myself and the group have decided that we need the rose in more than one panel.

So far so good in terms of putting together the panels, Alysha has worked her magic again on Adobe Photoshop by creating the front and the back panels. Below is what she has come up with so far.

The back:

I love the authenticity that Alysha has managed to produce on the two panels. Especially the one above, the Mercury Prize award and the Columbia Records emblem makes this panel look outstandingly professional. The band's website and the record label's website is something you would see on a real album! The background of the hundreds of roses is actually just picture of a bunch of roses scattered on to the floor, which Alysha has then duplicated in photoshop around 50 times. It has made an outstanding effect.

The front:

The initial idea of Claire holding the rose an then eventually picking the rose petals off and dropping them onto the floor was my idea. We were filming Claire when she had to be isolated and in distress, we shone a bright light to the left of her in a dark room, with a white background behind her and it created this fantastic clear shadow! Alysha the group's photographer was obviously inspired by this image and it has turned out to be a great photo, with the necessary editing done to it in Adobe Photoshop.

To edit the original photo Alysha used a small amount of tools in Photoshop, she simply brought the contrast up and the brightness down. She then used the eraser tool to blur the edges around the pictures. She then added the text in the bottom corner, the same font and size that she used in the advert, it is vital that we have this continuity running through out our ancillary tasks!

The front of our digipak:

Final digipak:

Below is a link to Alysha's blog.

Alysha Bennett's blog.

Production of the advert!

Alysha and Charlotte are producing the group's two ancillary tasks, the magazine advert and the digipak. Myself and Claire haven't worked on the two tasks at all but we have obviously given our ideas for how to improve it.

The whole feel to our video is a dark one with an aery edge to it. It was very important for our group that our video matched up with the two ancillary tasks, so we decided to have as the main house style through out it all as black and red, the black really enforces the meaning of our song, The Funeral, and also the red represents the rose in our video which is a big part! However, with the advert and digipak we had to incorporate Claire.

Originally the picture below was going to be the main advert, obviously changed with Alysha brilliant editing skills in Adobe Photoshop. Every time she made a new advert, which was quite a lot, she always asked for mine and Claire's feedback, and i think by doing this we grew as a group and so did our advert. As you will see later in this posting our final advert did include the rose draped down, but not Claire in this picture.

Alysha took the original picture above and transformed it to something brilliant in my opinion using Adobe Photoshop. By making everything black and white apart from the rose it makes the rose look beautifully crisp and really natural! She then tided up the whole picture using the photo edges filter tool, then simply cut out the part she wanted to use, by using the magic wand tool. She then desaturated the whole image and used the history brush to colour the rose back in to it's normal colours!

She then cut the rose out, and placed four images around Claire that we took of her when we were filming. The images are all of Claire looking in distress apart from the one in the bottom corner. The one in the corner almost looks like she has two faces and two sides to her. In the video she is almost two different people, very happy enjoying life and then suddenly i crush her back down so i think alysha has done very well capturing those sides!

Below is the stages that are music video advert took during it's production, the group all had input into what we wanted to see in the advert and how it could be improved.

Below is our finished advert for our music video, as you can see our last picture in our development of the advert is different from the final advert. We all agreed we needed a fourth picture and when we found the blurry almost two faced one of Claire we knew it would work well with our concept. So below is our music video advert!

Below is a link to Alysha's blog

Alysha Bennet's blog

Feedback from the rough cut

We showed our rough cut video to the class recently and asked for their feedback on the video. The bits they liked, we could improve on and most importantly the bits they didn't like. Myself and the group were happy with some of the comments we received, for example they thought the pace of the editing fitted the music very well in most parts of the video and they also liked the black and white effects used. However there were recommendations made to use by our class mates that we will definitely listen to. The two parts in the video that came up on more than one occasion was the amount of time spent on the bullying Facebook messages and also how the camera was sometimes shaky in scenes. Myself and the rest of the group will certainly look at the recommendations and create ideas for how to rectify our mistakes. But the main point made about our rough cut was the mount of gaps we had parts. Getting lots of good footage is our main priority at the moment!

Roles and Responsibilities

These are the groups roles and responsibilities when filming, constructing the video and the two ancillary tasks. The roles and responsibilities stated below are what we all want to do and our skills match our chosen areas, obviously we will all help contribute different ideas to what we think looks the best when filming, editing and constructing the two ancillary tasks.

Rough cut

For some strange reason the Rough cut of the video refuses to upload onto my blog, I have tried it many times but there has been no successful outcome. However below I have produced a link to Alysha's blog to her post of the rough cut.

Rough cut.

Editing the video.

Myself and Claire are editing our footage for the video, we will be using Final Cut Express. We have picked up the editing techniques fairly fast in my opinion, just by experimenting with what each tool does and how it can help our video. We first had to capture all of our footage onto the computer and into Final Cut Express using the capture button located in the File drop down menu, this was quite a challenge to start off with but after some guidance and practice, we soon picked it up! An example is below.

The Razor Blade Tool is what we are using when cutting away the parts of the video that we don't want. We both found this very easy to use after some practice, of course! Another tool we have familiarized ourselves with is the Crop Tool, this allows us to cut away edges of our footage that we may have accidently filmed and for obvious reasons we don't want it anymore. This tool has become very useful, when filming our video we obviously line up all the shots so that there are no doors, light switches, bit's ofcarpet and unnecessary scenery in the shot. This has happened on two occasions so far, one when filming Claire supposedly dead on the floor, we covered the red carpet with a white sheet, on the camera it look very nice, framed well and we were happy with the result, but after placing our footage onto the computer it seemed to expand slightly, the edges of where she was laying there was red carpet. And also the clip where Claire pick's off the rose in the shadow, on the camera it looked well done, no errors, I myself actually framed this shot, but when we placed it onto the computer Claire's head was in her way, so the cropping tool on this occasion was very useful.

Our song is called the funeral, which has some obvious black and white connotations connected to it, we discovered the desaturate tool in the effects column. This turns the piece of clip highlighted all into black and white, so for us this is perfect, we will be using this for the funeral scene towards the end of the video and also when Claire has the flashbacks of when her relationship with me was a happy one.

At the moment the editing stage is a slow process, seeing as we have limited footage. We know what we want we know where to put it and we know it will work with the music, we just need to get all of our idea's out and get on with filming it. We are filming again it in two or three days, we have to make sure we film our missing parts.

Here are a couple of editing screenshots.

Shotlists

This is the group's shotlist below, it was produced by the whole of the group with all of our idea's combined into the shotlist. We had a rough idea of how we wanted the scenes in the video to be placed. After talking with one another we put together the final shotlist (below). We feel that the scenes on the shotlist will work well in timing with the music and most importantly will look good in the order that they are in. Obviously we put together our shotlist before we started filming. After filming out on location I definitely feel that we have been a bit adventurous with our timings from one scene to another. For example close up to dead face 0:09 to 0:17 and also close up to Facebook wall posts bullying messages 2:28 to 2:42. These two scenes in particular in my opinion are to long. To solve this we can obviously add new editions to the video and also during the filming we can use different effects, for example lots of quick cuts.

Filming. Day one

All being new to filming, we were all a bit rough to start off with. We all knew the first time we filmed the video it wouldn't be perfect and that there would be some school boy errors. We started off by filming the main parts of the video. The argument, picking off rose petals, the romantic scenes, the Facebook and text messages and Claire laying out the pills.

To start with we filmed the Facebook messages and text messages without the use of the tripod, this didn't give us very good footage as you can imagine. When i was holding the camera it seemed fine, but when we transferred it to the computer all the clips were very shaky and a lot of them out of focus. From then on we used the tripod for every scene necessary!

We then moved onto filming the argument scene, this was a complicated one for everyone to film, as it was with two people. We were unsure how to film this scene, the main idea we had was to film who ever was speaking from behind the shoulder of the person not speaking. This was a good concept but when we came to filming it i was a lot bigger than Claire, and the audience view of it would just look stupid. However me being a lot bigger than her it did show my dominance in a way, almost like i was towering over her. The other problem we had was that the argument scene was filmed in the snow, and the rest of our video isn't. So i think we will definitely be filming this scene again. We have already developed some new ideas for how to film this part of the video. In the video Love the way you lie by Eminem, the argument scene in that video is filmed handheld and when the girl is thrown back the camera goes with her, i think we should definitely try this when filming next! Losing the tripod for this scene takes away the stillness and the formality of an argument scene, we need to be angry and i really need to push her around and show my emotion. I also had the idea of filming the argument scene from far away to set the scene of the argument almost, then just have close ups of mine and Claire's faces during the argument that we will cut to.

We moved onto filming Claire picking the rose petals off one by one then suddenly losing it and ripping the rose apart, throwing the petals everywhere very aggressively. She was in a corner all on her own and we filmed it with the camera above her so it was like looking down on her and also showing how vulnerable she is. I think we filmed that part very well, the scene was well lit with the natural light coming through the window and the camera angles we

re spot on for what we had in mind. This part of the video could be played all in one with no cuts between, but i think this part would work very well if we played a happy romantic scene between me and Claire and her picking off one or two petals, then the argument scene where she could pick off more petals at a faster tempo and finally show the Facebook me

ssages and text messages from my character and her ripping the rose to shreds!

We had many ideas for how the happy scenes between me and

Claire could work out. We were really keen on the idea of us laughing and joking on a sofa or a bench somewhere and then film Claire after we have split up on her own in the exact same place. We also thought about filming us playing a game and having a picnic together, with the same idea of her being on her own in the same places. In the end we filmed us laughing and joking with my arm around her on the sofa, it was well lit when we were there, but after transferring it to the computer the scene did look dull, so i think we will be having to re film that part again. We filmed it using the tripod, a handheld camera for this scene is unnecessary. I think we do a need a lot more happy/romantic scenes with me and Claire because the audience need to see that dramatic change in the way i treat after the argument. We had the idea of us holding hands while walking past the camera. But i think there is still a lot of work to do on this scene.

The final part of the video we filmed was Claire's intention to commit suicide. When filming this part we used a lot of close ups of the pills and Claire's hand picking them up, but we didn't actually do any acting, so for example Claire popping out the pills and looking very anxious to whether or not to take her own life. We also filmed it using the tripod, i think for when Claire is popping out the pills this is the right way to film it, but when she is deciding whether or not to do it and also taking some of the pills it should be handheld, this adds to her decision making being blurred and her shaky emotions!

Filming. Day two

We have been filming the video recently and I think I should right up what exactly we have been filming. We have been filming in one main location of Horton Kirby, the location has everything we need. We have done most of the filming in Charlotte's house. It has all of the necessary backdrops for what we want, they are also well lit, however we have used artificial lighting for the singing parts and the happy scenes. We were in a small dilemma for the parts we had filmed outside already, the snow on the ground would look stupid during an argument scene if we then cut to Claire running away in a green lane. So we decided to re - film all of the argument scenes again.

We started the day by filming a part we haven't filmed yet, it is a vital point in the video, where the drum beat really hits hard simultaneously for about 4 seconds, we all agreed that it sounds like running away very frantically, so that's exactly what we filmed. We found a quiet lane and filmed Claire running away looking back occasionally with panic on her face. We made the mistake the first time we filmed of only filming from one angle, this time we filmed the same clip from different angles and using different methods. We filmed it once using the tripod from a stationery position with her just running past it and into the distance. In this part of the video Claire is supposed to be under threat and very panicky, we had the idea of filming her running away using the camera just handheld. This gave the shaky scared effect that we were looking for, we filmed it from her eye line so it gave the audience a personal view in what she's going through. I then ran behind her Claire with the handheld camera, so it looked like I was chasing her, and it the final result looked really good, hopefully it will appear in the video.

We then moved on to filming the funeral scene, where i as the boy goes to the graveyard of where Claire is buried, we filmed me walking in through the gate and approaching the graveyard, with the look of panic and fear on my face, we also filmed me opening the gate above the symbol of Christ. The two clips were really well lit with the natural lighting of the day and it produced a good outcome in the end. We then moved on to filming Charlotte and Alysha has mourning friends standing by her grave, i then approach them and they both look at me in an angry and blaming look. We filmed this part from over my shoulder and also from a long shot, it was vital we filmed it in different angles. We think that this part will be to end the video, it's an emotional time and it suits the soft ending of the song where there are almost coral parts to the music.