Final Music Video

The quality is extremely bad because i had to export it into various different formats before I found one that youtube would upload.

Evaluation

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4) - This is just a voice recording of myself. I kind of got sick of filming myself.

Official Magazine Poster/Insert

The above pictures, are the best group pictures i have of the band so i decided to use one of them for my magazine poster.

This was my first draft for the magazine insert. I concentrated on making the album release date clear, so consumers could see exactly when it was out and then go and purchase it. The album name is very large to show that it is important, and it's

what we are trying to sell. I stuck to the charcoal black/white theme like my digipak to show brand continuity. Once again the band name is the only thing in colour (apart from the itunes symbol) as a part of the band's style. This makes the name stand out, so that customers remember the band, not for our look but for our music. So like the rest of the digipak, the image of the band is not really important as we are part of the rock/indie/pop genre.

After receiving feedback from my teacher, I was told that the writing on the poster was unbalanced and that I also needed to add more information. Taking this into consideration, I arranged the title and release date under each other to balance the picture. I also added information at the bottom of the poster about the single 'So What' being available on itunes. As you can see, i feel that there was a huge improvement from my draft to my final poster. The whole image is clearer, the customer gets alot of information without it taking over the picture. The band is also advertised well and the whole concept is funky and different - much like our band.

My other teacher then told me she did not like the wording of "Album out on" so I changed it, making the picture below the FINAL magazine poster/insert.

Official digipak pictures

We were asked to create six images for our digipak rather than four. I didn't draw up any drafts of my digipak as i wanted to just get on photoshop and start messing around so I could get to know how the software works.

When first told to come up with ideas for the digipak, I decided to draw up spider diagram of my initial ideas.

From this diagram, I then circled the ideas i found interesting and wanted to explore further. As you can see I chose FUNKY, BLACK/WHITE, MODERN and SCRAPBOOK. I thought these ideas could be explored further to create good and exciting digipaks.

In the picture above, I wrote down more detailed ideas about the style of my digipak. As you can see, I went with the scrapbook theme and decided to make it un ordinary and funky, while keeping it modern. I decided to call it an Antique scrapbook, as all pictures look like they are black and white or drawn with charcoal. This was created using photoshop and its many effects toolbars.

When thinking about the front cover of my digipak, I decided to use this group picture of us posing with out arms folded. A group picture for the front shows our unity as a band and the fact that we are doing the same pose shows our closeness-much like a family.

The picture above is the official front cover for my digipak. The theme is one of a an antique picture/drawing/painting that has been stuck onto a black book - much like a scrapbook. Everything is in black and white including the album name. Only the band name is in colour. I did this because I thought it worked really well with the black and white but also because it symbolises the importance of the band name. Even if people don't remember our faces, as long as they remember our music - we would have served our purpose. Our picture is in balck and white because of the message we are trying to send our audience. Which is that it is not about the bands image or how we look, but rather it is all about our music.

I find this and the above picture that I used for the front cover the best group pictures. Because of this I decided to use this picture for the back cover as it symbolises unity and family like the other picture did.

The above picture is my official back cover. It made sense to create the back cover after the front as they are the two most important parts of a digipak - they are always on show. I used the same antique scrapbook theme and this shows brand continuity. Once again the group picture is in black and white charcoal and has an old/antique look to it. this was created using an effect tool on photoshop. After I put the barcode on the left, i thought the right hand side looked a little empty and this made the picture unbalanced, so I added a website name to it. This is one of the many ways that our fans will have access to us/learn about us.

This is my Inside cover 1. It just introduces us individually as artists. Although I said the band is not about image, I think our fans at least deserve to know our names. I also think the different pictures show off our different personalities and how they work well together. Once again all pictures are in black and white and look like they have been stuck on a black background - showing brand continuity. I put our names in colour, like the front cover because it contrasted really well with thew black and made the picture look more funky.

Originally, my first draft of inside cover 2 had two pictures of me and Teri, but I was told by my teacher that it left the other band members out, so i added in a picture of Setareh and Yusra (Dutchie)

Inside cover 2 has pictures of all band members and also gives a bit of information about how the band was set up. I thought the fans would enjoy this part as it shows the origins of the band. It also shows how we relate to our target audience as we are students. It shows that we achieved all our fame and fortune through hard work and came from the bottom up, making us just like everyone else. I stuck with the digipak theme which shows brand continuity.

Inside cover 3 is just a word of thanks to our fans. By doing this I am staying loyal to our old fans and also thanking new fans in advance for supporting us. This is a marketing tools, as the more good fans a music artist has, the more successful they will be. ie - fans willing to buy albums and songs from itunes rather than downloading illegally. As you can see, the theme is still being carried out - brand continuity.

I must be honest and say I had run out of ideas by the time it came to the final inside cover, all my creativity had been spent on the previous pictures. However, I found a wonderful image of the band in a band environment - playing instruments - and went along with the antique scrapbook theme. It is a fun picture and shows the band in their comfort zone.

Overall, I am very happy with the outcome of my digipak - I wouldn't change anything about it and i think it really portrays the band exactly how I wanted it to - A fun funky girl band who really care about the music they produce.

Diary Entry 31/03/11 - Problems with editing

The program used to edit the main product (music video) is Final cut express. I found the program typically easy to use as I had used it last year for my film opening. However, we had to use new effects such as the chroma key effect which got rid of all the green from the green scene/added an effect on the green screen. I found this new tool quite difficult to use and this is evident in the final video because in some parts, you can see that I didn't manage to get rid of all the green.

Here is a little video with a couple of basics of how to use Final Cut anyway:

All about music posters

I found an article on ehow.com which had a lot of information about the history of music posters so I have copied it below.

The Music Poster's Origins

• One of Cheret's Music Posters

  The first music posters as such were hand-drawn or hand-written handbills posted to advertise a local performance. The invention of the printing press changed advertising as much as it did literature. As commercial printing presses grew more sophisticated, so did the popularity of the printed advertisement. However, these printed advertisements were limited to text and crude art.
  The advent of lithography in the late 18th century brought art and graphic arts to a much wider audience. Artists and commercial printers alike were able to reproduce works of art and advertisements in color. Lithography changed the art world and the advertising world by allowing images to travel in ways they never had before---in books, prints and posters.
  By the Victorian era, lithography was an advertising staple and was often used to create posters that promoted popular entertainment. The popularity of musical entertainments during this period meant that music posters were among the most common of advertising posters.

The First Golden Age of the Music Poster---the Belle Epoque

• A Belle Epoque-Era Music Poster

  During the late Victorian era, the emergence of the Belle Epoque brought an emphasis on art and beauty to even the mundane. Thus, the era of the artistic poster was born, and the first great era of the music poster was born, as well.
  French artist Jules Cheret is credited with popularizing the use of serious art and serious artists in poster advertising. Cheret not only perfected lithography techniques, but during the 1880s, he began to take commissions to create art especially for advertising posters. Soon, other serious artists---including Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard---began to take advertising commissions, as well.
  As the Belle Epoque era waned to the Art Nouveau era, artists such as Alphonse Mucha began to take up Cheret's cause and create beautiful, artistic entertainment posters.

The Music Poster in the First Half of the 20th Century

• A Stanley Mouse Music Poster

  The Art Nouveau era was pushed aside by the Art Deco era, but music posters were pushed aside by two even more lasting contributions to the 20th century---the movies and radio.
  As the popularity of film and radio, and later television, increased, the use of posters to advertise music and other entertainments aside from film declined. Music performances declined in popularity with the advent of radio; when a live performer did come to town, shows were often promoted on the radio.
  Movies also played a part in the decline of music posters during this time. After the invention of the sound film, some of the most popular short film subjects were musical acts.
  While posters were still created during this time, they were often handbills, or even marquees, which could not be preserved.

The Second Golden Age of the Music Poster---the Sixties

• With the counter-culture movement of the 1960s came a new emphasis on the poster as advertisement. At no other time in history has the poster been used so effectively to advertise music.
  While pop music had been around for at least a decade and had made major inroads into television and radio, bands just getting their start often had to rely on word of mouth and print advertisement for exposure. Artists such as Peter Max, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley and others created music posters that would come to define the art of the decade.
  Taking cues from both the Andy Warhol-influenced pop art of the day and the Belle Epoque and Art Nouveau poster styles, the music posters of the 1960s blended both art and text in psychedelic posters that reflected the changing times.

The Seventies and Everything After

• As the counter-culture of the 1960s became the popular culture of the 1970s, radio and television embraced the bands and the types of music that had once been considered underground. As a result, music posters once again faded as a primary form of advertisement.
  The punk and hardcore scenes that emerged in the late 1970s abandoned the art of the 1960s, embracing a DIY attitude. Music posters re-emerged, but in the punk era, they took the form of photocopied handbills.
  The music poster's decline continued in the 1980s, as MTV and other television stations became the primary way for bands to promote themselves. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the Internet dealt the music poster its final blow.
  While music posters can still be found adorning college dorm walls, they are no longer the artistic form that they once were. Music artists no longer need posters to promote themselves, and, as a result, the modern music poster is more likely to be a blown-up photograph of the artist rather than an artist's rendering.

  Here is a video with a couple of music posters:

  
  

  

  

  

Diary Entry 25/03/11 - Our Final decision

CATASTROPHE

One of the members left the group, which made the group fall apart. So now there are two of us. Me and Setareh and we have a couple of days to shoot a whole new song and video.

Diary Entry 16/03/11 - Digipak and using photoshop

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a professional image editing software. We used photoshop to edit our ancillary texts, which were our digipaks and magazine posters. One of our teachers (Phil) gave us a quick tutorial about how to the basics of photoshop.

He told us to always work with a 500dpi image resolution and also that we should always create new layers anytime we want to change the picture, so that they can easily be removed/ adjusted.

Although I found Phil's tutorial very helpful and interesting, I decided to do some into photoshop myself and found some tutorial videos which are below:

editing in photoshop from Sarah on Vimeo.

Photoshop Tutorial - For more funny videos, click here

Diary Entry 09/03/11 - Pre-filming talk

Just a pre-filming diary entry talking a bit about what has been going on.

Green screen

Chroma key compositing (or chroma keying) is a technique for compositing two images or frames together in which a color (or a small color range) from one image is removed (made transparent), revealing another image behind it. This technique is also referred to as color keying, color-separation overlay (CSO; primarily by the BBC), greenscreen, and bluescreen. It is commonly used for weather forecast broadcasts, wherein the presenter appears to be standing in front of a large map, but in the studio it is actually a large blue or green background. The meteorologist stands in front of a bluescreen, and then different weather maps are added on those parts in the image where the color is blue. If the meteorologist wears blue clothes, his clothes will become replaced with the background video. This also works for greenscreens, since blue and green are considered the colors least like skin tone. This technique is also used in the entertainment industry, for example for special effects. (wikipedia)

Filming and taking pictures in front of the green screen allowed us to use special effects while editing the video.

Diary Entry 04/03/11 - things are not going well

Research into digipaks

Digipaks typically consist of a gatefold (book-style) paperboard or card stock outer binding, with one or more plastic trays capable of holding a CD or DVD attached to the inside. Since Digipaks were among the first alternatives to jewel cases to be used by major record companies, and because there is no other common name for Digipak-style packaging made by other companies, the term digipak or Digi-Pak is often used generically, even when the media holder is a hub or "Soft Spot" rather than a full plastic tray.

Digipak-style packaging is often used for CD singles or special editions of CD albums and the tall DVD Digipak (DVDigipak) is used as a premium package for DVDs and DVD sets. Because such packaging is less resistant to abrasion than jewel cases, it tends to show signs of wear relatively quickly. Licensed digipak manufacturers such as domestic U.S. printer and disc replicator Oasis Disc Manufacturing recommend coating the raw printed paper with a protective UV coating, thus ensuring greater longevity. (wikipedia)

I found a couple of video on youtube showing digipaks of albums and I used these to generate ideas for my own digipaks.

RIHANNA - LOUD ALBUM

ADELE - 21 ALBUM

LENKA - 2 ALBUM

LADY GAGA - THE FAME MONSTER ALBUM

Diary Entry 18/02/11 - How things are going in general

Diary Entry 10/02/11 - About the photoshoot

MUSIC VIDEO PHOTOSHOOT

Just a couple of photos from our photo-shoot. These are the main pictures which we used for our digipaks and promo posters/magazine inserts.

Diary Entry 26/01/11 - How the filming went

Diary Entry 19/01/11 - Getting ready for filming

Diary Entry 19/01/11 - Just getting ready to go and film for the music video

All Pre-Production work

What is a treatment ?

At the beginning of every music video project, there is a need to work with the artist to define a desired treatment. A video treatment, also known as video concept, outlines information with regards to what the music video will be about.

My Treatment - It is very basic, hasn't got alot of detail as it is just an outline of a possible version of the video. I also realised that some of the scene might be impossible to film (such as the perfromance scene) as it would be hard to find a large crowd and a legit venue to perform in.

The video starts with an establishing shot of Trafalgar square in central London. It is nighttime and the square is lit up by the various lights.

FAST CUTS of other landmarks in central London such as Big Ben, London eye, London bridge, River Thames etc until Pink starts singing.

CUT to the band standing in a row with their backs turned. They seem to be on some sort of empty road in the daytime. They start moving around appearing as if they are looking for something behind cars and dustbins.

Cut to front view of band, all wearing casual clothes ie – jeans and tops. They begin lip singing to the lyrics of the song while dancing up the street. (during this scene, various shots of different cuts from different views. Ie . long shots, close ups, birdseye view shot etc. )

When chorus comes CUT to a stage where the band are performing in front of a crowd. Everyone is lip synching The band are a little more dressed up now – wearing things like tailored shorts, blazers, vest tops. Also goth looking makeup such as black eyeliner and black lipstick. Rae on the drums, Lucinda on the mic, Dutchie on the keyboard and Setareh on the guitar. The girls are clearly giving a performance which the audience are loving. Lots of movement like jumping, good stage presence. (once again various shots will be used with fast cuts to make it a very fast paced video.)

Before the end of the chorus the girls fall back on stage CUT to them falling back on grass at a park. The girls are back in casual clothes (makes it seem they are back in their normal lives where they are not performing.) They are playing around in the grass and on swings and slides at the park, lip synching and being aware that the camera is there. (almost like they are recording themselves.) Once again different shots of the scene are used with fast cuts to keep up the pace of the video.

Chorus scene is repeated again (Stage performance) with minor changes such as interacting with audience by holding their hands or throwing things to them.

CUT to a bedroom scene where all the girls are in pyjamas…The shirt and bottom types that mainly men wear. Focus on Teri lip synching slow part while the other comfort her. Various slow cuts of shots of this

While the chorus approaches the girls decide to have a pillow fight to increase the pace of the song again. Back to a very fast paced song with fast cuts.

Finish off song alternating between shots of stage performance and pillow fight scene.

Animatics

At it simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and shown in a sequence. Rough dialogue and a rough soundtrack are then added to these images to test if they are working effectively together. With this the directors and animators can then work out camera positions, shot lists and any timing issues. The process is repeated until it is perfected An advantage of using storyboards is that it allows the user to experiment with changes in the storyline to evoke a stronger reaction of interest from its target audience.

This is my simple animatic for a possible version of the 'So What' video

Recces

Location scouting in Camden Town

similar text

My first chosen similar text is Scandal.

Scandalスキャンダル is a Japanese pop/rock girl band. Proclaiming themselves as "The Most Powerful Japanese Girlie Pop Rock", they are composed of four high school girls from Osaka, Japan: Haruna Ono, Tomomi Ogawa, Mami Sasazaki, and Rina Suzuki. Scandal is very energetic, mostly because Ono, the eldest and leader of the band, shares lead vocals with the other three members, in order to not have a focus on one girl in particular and to give each time in the limelight.
An interesting note about the group is the unique way in which they chose to promote themselves. Since they are fans of Japanese animation and manga, they wanted to be represented in animated form, turning each member into an animated character. The animated Scandal is featured on a series of promotional videos on the band's website. (wikipedia )

I feel that this girl band is very much like the artists we are trying to portray in our music video.

We have many things in common ;

Both a four girl band

both students

Both in the pop/rock genre

Both play instruments

Here is a video of theirs o give you a little taste of what they are about

What I like about them and how they relate to the band we are trying to create

Second Similar text is a girl band called Vixen

Vixen, one of the most successful female rock bands in the world, produced massive hits like “Edge of a Broken Heart” and “Cryin’” securing their position in the rock charts – including 4 singles in Billboard’s Hot 100. Vixen has reappeared with two new albums, a delicate explosion of new talent and passionate forces, producing a new sound while staying true to their roots.

They are a typical rock and roll band with the big hair and leather.

I would have loved to create a band like this as I love 80's music. However we have to create a band that a 21st century audience of teenagers can relate to in order to be successful.

Their very first album was released in 1988 and is called 'Vixen'

here is the cover

They are very different from Scandal as they are an older and emerged closer to the beginning of the rock period. They were a very successful band.

Although they are not exactly the same as the band we are trying to create, they still follow the general codes and conventions of a rock girl band and this is why I chose them.

Here is the video for the single 'Edge of a broken heart' from their first album.

Preliminary Tasks

Although I was not in the F-word video, I took part in the final stages of editing.

The original song:

Audience types

Mainstream - This is a large audience that watch or listen to one thing. It is calculated by ratings or box office.

Main genres would be POP, ROCK, HIP-HOP and RnB with videos by artists such as :

Videos

Cult - A small but loyal following audience of a particular media text. Genres such as GRIME, GARAGE etc

Artists include:

Videos:

The other Audience types are:

Subversive - This is an audience that watch controversial media texts that could offend.

Alternative - Opposite of mainstream. Audience enjoy media texts that are similar to similar to mainstream media texts, but differ in various ways.

Below is an image of my target audience

My target audience is will be mainly teenage girls as we are are a teenage girl band. I would hope for us to be a mainstream band, but it is likely we will be cult or Alternative as the mainstream audiences usually consist of RnB these days.