Audience Feedback 4. How did you find the film?

This feedback was mainly directed at the continuity of our video. Comments made were that the video as a whole flowed nicely and that the camera transitions were good. These are obviously great comments to hear because it means that we had smooth continuity throughout which is one of the most important points for a narrative based music video or any film in general.

Sound quality was also mentioned in a good light, which i was actually quite surprised about as i thought the sound could of been better as it was just a basic small studio recording, but if the audience thought it was good then it's clearly not as bigger problem as I thought. If we were to do it again though, I think I would still try to get hold of a better recording even if this means setting it up and recording ourselves.

Audience Feedback 3. Did the storyline stand out to you?

By looking at this feedback it's clear that our storyline worked well overall, especially how it fitted with the music. I watched our music video again after seeing this feedback and saw an example of when the "mood of the music fitted with the story" The example is where me and Nathan are sat on the sofa and I look annoyed with him because the music goes into a slightly more serious tone and starts to build up like the story does. It also comes in with the lyrics "see now you're having fun" which creates a sarcastic view, again fitting well with the story.

Another comment was that they enjoyed the ending and thought it was good. Creating a satisfying ending was something we aimed to do as we felt it would be a little annoying for audiences if we left the love based story on a cliffhanger.

Audience Feedback 2. How did you feel about the editing?

From this persons feedback we learnt that generally our editing worked well however, we maybe shouldn't of cut back to the band as much as we did. This could be because it disturbed the story too much or just looked a bit messy.

Q3. How effective is the combination of my main product and my ancillary tasks?

http://prezi.com/cp-jmbdqfr4e/a2-evaluation-q3/

Q2. How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning and evaluation stages?

http://prezi.com/ggdyfpvrns27/a2-evaluation-q4/

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product conforms to many different forms and conventions of real media products as we use certain things and events that are typically associated with teens/youth because they are our target audience. We conform to ideologies of typical teens such as the 'boy likes girl' love story which has been in many other music videos as it's a typical story that a lot of people can relate to. An example we looked at in our research was New Found Glory's song - Dressed to Kill, where both of the main characters like each other but they are unaware and this maintains throughout the video and then ends on a cliff hanger. We were inspired by this video and decided to use the general outline of the story and develop it a little more, as our ending would be a resolved happy one. There are many different categories that a music video can fall into which are performance, narrative, artistic/stylistic and original. We wanted ours to be narrative and performance so that the audience had something interesting to watch as well as seeing who the band was, however when creating out video we were unable to get hold of the singer, so our video is challenging the normal conventions of a music video as it doesn’t show the singer during the whole video, or the other band members faces. Most videos within the pop punk genre use performance throughout for example, Forever the Sickest Kids – Whoa Oh, All Time Low – Weightless and Blink 182 – Feeling This.

The pop punk genre often uses the setting of a gig or a party, for example You Me At Six – Gossip and Jimmy Eat World – The Middle, these videos often use sex as a form of advertising to people. Our original idea was to conform to these conventions within the genre because we knew that parties, gigs and sex are associated with teenagers quite a lot and we wanted to make sure that our video applied enough to our target audience. However, we encountered many problems when trying to film these scenes, one main one being that we didn’t have the full band and also not enough people to replicate a gig so we started to re-think ideas and found that we were able to experiment with the different forms and challenge them in a way that worked for our music video.

Pop punk attracts a mixture of mainstream and non-mainstream audiences because the genre often lies between the two. The edgy guitars and punk side to this genre is what puts it in the non-mainstream area meaning that audiences would be interested and entertained by underground culture and unconventional approaches such as Sum 41’s video for ‘Fat Lip’ which consists of loads of punk/rock/grunge orientated people having some sort of gig outside in what looks like a previous factory or building area, with scenes of people skating around and dressed in foil covered boxes which is definitely not mainstream to say the least. Our music video challenges this because we stick to quite mainstream themes and events throughout such as a typical ‘love story’ between two young people which can be seen in many pop videos such as Justin Bieber - Baby. This then means that we are conforming to the pop side of the genre by continuing the mainstream themes and ideas behind some of them.

In most music videos, be it pop punk or R&B, there is nearly always video footage of the singer and the other members of the bands faces for example A Day To Remember – Have Faith In Me and Paramore – Misery Business. Now as we weren’t able to get hold of the singer, we couldn’t film them, however if we wanted to we could’ve got someone to pretend but as we said before we thought this would a good opportunity to experiment with these particular conventions, especially as the narrative style to our video conformed to the mainstream and pop part of the genre quite a lot. So we decided against having footage of a singer which therefore challenges these forms and conventions of making the lead singer the main focus of the video which is often what usually happens, it only takes one look at any of Paramore’s videos to see that Hayley Williams gets much more exposure during their music videos than any of the band.

In most music videos of all genres, the people who create the video will first listen and interpret the lyrics of the track so that they understand what the song is actually about. This is often used especially for narrative videos because they can then base the story around the lyrical meaning so that the piece as a whole makes sense and fits together. We used this idea because we didn’t want to have a video that didn’t match up to the lyrics as it would probably leave the audience quite confused unless we created something very abstract. When going through the lyrics we got from it that it the girl in this story already has a boyfriend or is already dancing with a different guy and throughout the song the other guy who wants her is consistent in trying to get through to her by saying and proving how much happier she will be with him instead of the guy she's dancing with. We then developed this idea more and created the narrative through filming so that the two seemed to go together. One way we did this was by matching up the scene where the girl is sat on the sofa looking bored and annoyed with her boyfriend next to her, with the section of the song that has the lyrics “see now you’re having fun” to create a sarcastic view that fits the storyline.

When editing another common thing with music videos is that they cut on the beat on each shot to enhance the bridge between the track and the video and make it look more seamless for example All Time Low - Weightless. Our video uses this technique because we wanted to create a more polished product instead of one that looked sloppy and unfinished.

Finished Digi-Pak

This is the inside for my digi-pak design, as you can see i have a very simple design for the place where the CD goes but still kept the same colours and themes throughout. I've conformed to the conventions of other digi-paks by giving a short bit of information on who is in the band and what they do and keeping the same sort of image of the trainer with the photcopy effect on it.


This is the front and back cover for my digi-pak, and again i have stuck to the general conventions of digi-paks by having the barcode, website and other contact information on the back.

Finished Magazine Advert

This is my finished magazine advert for the album by Lost in the Lights. As you can see i conformed to the conventions of other magazine adverts for albums by using the album cover as the main image, keeping the same theme going ie black and white colours and giving short and sweet reviews with a star rating to promote the band well. I chose magazines like Kerrang! and A P Magazine because they specialise in this genre of music meaning that people will recognise these names as credible sources rely on their judgement.

Q4. How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning and evaluation stages?

http://prezi.com/ggdyfpvrns27/a2-evaluation-q4/

Added digipak research

When creating the back of the cover i noticed that other cds have all sorts of information on the back like contact details, manufacturers and production names along with a barcode as well. So to make my back cover look realistic, i decided to include these things on mine as well.

An example of this is can be seen to the left on an album by The Jams. They have the track names and how long are there, a barcode in the bottom right and production information in the bottom left.













This back cover by lady gaga is an example of a more up to date version of the information that would more likely be on ours, as it has links to her website along with her facebook and twitter pages. I'm going to include this information bec ause our audience will be highly based in young people who use these social networking sites and spend a lot of time on the internet meaning that it would be effective in marketing the artist more.

Research for Magazine Advert

A lot of albums get advertised in magazines and often use a whole A4 page within it. The advert for the album usually uses images very similar, if not the same to the actual album cover which will then stick in their mind meaning it's a very successful way of promoting an album. Here some examples of magazine adverts for albums :

As you can see from Ellie Gouldings album - Lights the exact same image that was used on the album cover has been used for the advertisement, all they have done is add some good reviews and release date information at the bottom to let people know when and how they can get the album.



Gwen Stefani's album- Love Angel Music Baby also uses the same image on the advert as it does on the album, however it doesn't use the whole image only a section of it.







































Kings of Leon and Biffy Clyro are two bands in the similar genre of ours and these are more examples of how they use the same image in the adverts as the album cover which proves that it not just particular genres that do this.

By looking at all of these i plan to use the same image that i used for the front cover as the main image for the advert, and then put some information at the bottom including short, one lined reviews and release date information.

Front and Back covers finished

I spent today concentrating on getting at least the front and back cover of my digi-pak finished. For the front cover i went onto a site called fontspace.com which allows you to get more interesting fonts and transfer them to your own images. Once i had my font i changed the colour to grey so that it would be clearly visible on both the black and white parts of the image, and proceeded to move them about until i thought it looked okay. I put the name of the band in the top left and album name bottom right and decided that the image of the person standing on an empty with the skateboard was the best image to use, as it all just seemed to fit together right.

For the back cover i used the image i previously mentioned of the crowd which i edited with a photocopy effect and cropped and adjusted it until it was the right size. I then used the same font as before for the track names as i didn't want to make it seem like too much was going on or for it to just look tacky. I had to put the layers in a certain order so that the white rectangle that came around the font wasn't visible as is was underneath the main crowd image. This however meant that to see the writing i had to keep on adjusting the brightness and contrast until it was clear enough to read.

I then got the measurements for the width and height across the front, spine and back cover so that i could put the images into one and see how they look against each other and how well they fit. The measurements are 12.45cm high and 28cm long.

Editing Pictures

To get a better idea on what photo i should use for the front cover, i started to play around with the effects on photoshop. I especially paid more interest in the effects that altered colour and distortion effects as well. One effect that

i looked at was embossing an image which creates the effect of raised edges and changes the colours to grey and other shady colours, this is an example of the one of the images with an embossed effect.

With this angle, i thought the embossing worked quite well with it, however I'm not very keen on it for a front cover as i think the colours are a little too dull, and the rest of the image is lost in the effect, it's essentially just a pict

ure of a skateboard.

Next i thought i would try the effect that i previously used on the crowd image, which was photocopy. I quite liked this one as i thought the shad

owing on each object made everything stand out individually and was really effective. The only problem i have with this,

is whether the image looks too staged or not, i will probably make a more informed decision

after i have added the text of the band name and album title so that the gap at the front is filled, as this may enhance the image more and take some focus away from the actual image meaning it might not look as staged.

As i was scrolling through differen

t effects and settings i found something called the threshold for the colour and contrast of an image which i really liked the look of. It makes an image black and white but instead of a normal dull effect, it really emphasises the contrast and creates this interesting effect.

I altered the threshold on this image to the left. So far this is my favourite image as i like the way the light is almost like a spotlight on the main part of the image. I also like the way that the objects within the image are distorted and shadowed in a way that still makes them easy to identify and draw out the different connotations surrounding the skateboard and empty bottle in relation to the pop punk genre and youth.

After discovering this effect i thought i would try it on another image, however this one did not turn out as good.

The obvious problem with this one was the flash on the camera becoming too much of the main part of the image as it takes up most of it. This prevents audiences from seeing the other objects clear, for example it would be hard to make out the skateboard in this image, and although converse shoes are often associated with pop punk and other rock based genres, i don't think it's enough for a CD cover.

Narrowing down the Pictures

Because we took quite a lot of pictures, i had to try and narrow them down to ones that i was definitely not using and ones that i might use. After looking through them and imagining what they would look like as a CD cover, i was left with these 8.


Editing makes a lot of difference to an image, and i kept this in mind when looking at these 8 because even if the lighting isn't very good in some of them, editing will change that and make it look more presentable.

Taking Pictures

A couple of days ago i saw this picture to the left and it gave me another idea for a possible front cover for my digi-pak. Skateboarders are often associated with the genre of pop-punk and other rock based genres, and as our track is along the lines of pop-punk i thought it would fit well if i was able to get some pictures invloving a skateboard in a wayb that would work well as a front cover.

So a couple of days ago, me and my friend Leah went out with a camera and my skateboard to try and get some shots suitable for a CD cover. We started off with trying to re-create the picture above but it didn't have the 'front cover' potential i was looking for, we then saw an empty bottle of smirnoff ice which gave us an idea to create a staged image of someone who had fallen off a skateboard, with the empty bottle alongside to give the impression it was down to the alcohol. The only problem faced with this was to try and make it look like it wasn't staged so much otherwise it would lose effect. This idea seemed like a contender because teenagers are the main audience for pop-punk usually, and alcohol is often greatly associated with teenagers, so to put the three together (including the skateboard) it should create an effective image.

Back cover for Digi-Pak

Today i started doing more work on my digi-pak design by trying to create the back cover. I went through the old crowd footage and freeze-framed the part that i thought would look good as part of a digi-pak for a pop-punk band. On the left is the original image. With this i wanted to edit it in a way that makes the image more about the fact that it's a crowd and have less emphasis on the peoples faces.

To do this i will be using the programme Adobe Photoshop CS3 so that i can edit it properly by adding layers and editing each layer to create a more professional image.

I began looking through some of the effects, with a black and white, faded outline of the crowd in mind and found an effect called 'Photocopy' which made the image black and white and put emphasis on the shadow around each person in the crowd. I was able to change the darkness and opacity of the image to how i wanted and produced this image below.

One of the main things i like about this is how it blurs out some of the crowd members who are further back but still shows that it is clearly a crowd and it gives the impression that they is a lot of people there. I chose to do a crowd shot because the genre pop-punk often revolves around gigs and their fans and by having this on the back it would show a passer by that they must be quite good and play good music to produce a crowd who are clearly enjoying themselves. This type of black and white contrast with the shadow and brightness will be a recurring theme through my digi-pak design, because it will represent the music having some quite melodic guitar riffs against the punky drums.

The next thing i plan to do is create a list of songs that will be on the album, and apply them to this image effectively. I also plan to get a camera and take a picture of some studio equipment soon so that i can edit that for the inside of the digi-pak and continue to thinkmof ideas for the front cover logo/image.

Lost in the Lights - Now We're Having Fun - Final Cut

This is the final cut of music video for Lost in the Lights - Now We're Having Fun -->

Props

Props we used on Prezi

Finishing the editing

There was a bit of a gap before the quick fire shots that needed filling so we put three different band shots back to back to emphasise the performance side of the music video a bit more and make the video flow from start to finish.

The last thing we had left to do was take out all the audio created from the clip themselves as we didn't want any other noises or sounds over the main audio track. All this took was unlinking the video from the audio and pressing delete.

Editing 2

The next bit of editing we needed to perfect was the two pan shots of the two characters in separate rooms, talking to each other online. Originally we wanted a nice smooth pan from one side of the room i was in, a slight pause on the bit of wall in between, and then continuing across the room Ryan was in, but this became an issue when we were missing Nicole and Rich on the day we were filming this so me and Ryan had to do the best we could. We had to split the pan in two, so that we could film each others shot however, it proved to be a challenge to get the pan starting again in the right place and being nice and smooth as the tripod didn't go as high as we needed. But to fix this problem we thought it would look good and disguise the cut more, if we put a dissolve in to transaction from one to the other, which worked really well because it makes it look more like the characters are in separate rooms in separate houses, instead of just rooms next door to each other which we thought was better than our original vision of it. In future to avoid this trouble we should plan our filming a bit better and make sure that we have enough people to film a shot properly, as we did have this problem before with the shot of me and Nathan walking across the hill.

There was another slight problem with this shot we noticed when we looked at it and that was that the shot before it was of Ryan in his room turning on the laptop, and seeing as the pan shots start with me and then end on Ryan we thought it would make sense if it went the other way round but we couldn't just swap it because otherwise the pans would be going in different directions and not one continuous line. So to solve this we came up with the idea of changing the settings of the clips and putting them into reverse instead so that the pan is still in a line but starting with Ryan, which seemed to work well because there wasn't loads of movement within the shots meaning the audience won't notice that it's in reverse.

With everything done and edited apart from the end we saw that we still had time to fill before the ending, and also that the ending seems to just appear with only a little build up and it doesn't really feel like an ending. So we thought we would put in lots of quick fire shots of all the important moments in the story together, which represents the two characters journey and what they've gone through/how they got to how they are now. It also created the build up we needed because we sped them up quite a lot so that it makes the audience tense in waiting to see what the ending of the story will be. We faded out the last one and left a brief gap of just the black screen and then faded up the last scene of the two meeting each other and kissing, which all gave it the feeling of a proper ending.

Editing

So now that all the filming is definitely done and the fact that we've been editing some stuff as we go along, leaves us with only needing to finish off any editing and getting everything to flow nice and make sense.

We begun with the facebook/msn conversation on the laptops because together they were way to long, like so long that they could of taken up the hole song on their own, so this needed some serious work to cut it right down but still make sense and be readable. We first cut out the beginning small talk of the typical "Hey, How are you?" type conversation because that doesn't tell the audience anything specific or important so it was fine to cut out. Next we went through it and cut after each message sent on the two clips and started deleting every other clip because when we put it together and play it back, we wanted it to switch between the two screens/points of view, therefore we only needed every other clip, at this point we also sped the clips up a little to reduce the length more. The next challenge we had was trying to make sure that the audience would have enough time to read the message on screen and get the idea of what is happening, as this scene is quite vital to the story as it shows/confirms that the two characters are interested in each other. To do this we simply put it all together and watched it through, reading each message and from doing this we noticed that a few of them went by way too fast and couldn't be read in that time so we slowed those individual clips down a bit.

When we had finished doing this we put in the right place in our video and watched the whole thing through to see how it fitted in, but whilst watching this and thinking in a viewer's perspective, we came to the realisation that this scene was still a little long, we felt that it needed breaking up so we put a shot of the drums roughly half way through to it which worked quite well.

Another minor issue we came across when watching this shot in with everything else was that it was too big of a jump from the laptop screens to the two guys playing with a bottle outside. This wasn't much of a problem because all we needed to do was fade it down and the next one up so that it flowed better.

Ideas for Digi-pak

For the design of my digi-pak i thought that keeping it nice and simple is a good way to go as most of the ones i've seen have quite a simple theme and only a couple of colours throughout, for example Biffy Clyro - Only Revolutions uses the basic idea of some big flags being held up in a field and this is continued throughout. So for the front cover i was thiking of having quite a plain background, possibly light grey or white, with just one image in the middle that's either a band logo or an image than can be related to the music on the album. On the inside i was thinking of taking a couple of pictures of the recording studio up in music and some of the equipment which kind of gives an impression that they are a new band who are just starting out, i would then later edit the photos and put some effect on it to make it look better and more artistic. As for the back of the digi-pak my idea was to freeze frame one of the crowd shots that we didn't end up using in our video and again editing it in a programme like photoshop so that it wont stand out as much, and the song titles will still be visible on the back.