Digipak further research

Here is my powerpoint presentation of my further research into the art of digipaks and what should be considerd before making final decisions:

Audience feedback

Here is a presentation of the audience feedback that I did after finishing our animatic storyboarding;

Timeline

During the past week we have been working on our timeline and here we can see our finished result;

The six pages shows the action and at what time it should happens, this well help us on the shot day but also when we're editing our final product.

Letter to Universal Music

To Universal Music Group,

We are a group of A Level students working on an A level project for a qualification in Media Studies. We are writing to request permission to use the following track as a part of this project:

I’m Not Like Everybody Else by The Kinks.

With your permission the track would be used as the accompaniment to a short form video that is made purely for assessment purposes and will have no commercial usage. The video will be viewed only by members of the school community and the assessor of the examination board.

The artist and the copyright holder will of course be fully recognised in the pre-production and evaluation material that accompanies the project. We can also include a full copyright notice if required both in the planning material and on the video itself.

Yours sincerely,

Charlotte Morgan, Nina Jakobsen, Edward Nightingale, Teodora Nguyen

Hurtwood House School.

Feedback

This is excellent work - there are evident clear accounts of your planning and research for your music video production day after half term.  I like the way in which decision making is evident along with reflection and revisions.  Your cast list has been agreed and you need to be working on the set design and organisation of production.  There are one or two ways to develop the blog.  First to begin using a wider range of blogging tools, if you can - there are lots of well presented images, but use of Flickr or powerpoint will increase the creativity that is shown on your blog.  Second the valid, detailed and reflective comments that you make need to be developed further with  key media concepts and theoretical ideas;  for example, link the planning to star image,  or how set design and lighting link to mise en scene and/ or what model's of lighting you are using in relation to your set - key, fill, directional, discuss the intensity and colour and what you are trying to represent about your artist.
This will help make a more thorough evaluation of your work. 
Well done.

The importance of research and planning

During the last few weeks we have had a lot of planning to do to be well prepared for our shot of the music video. All the research we have done have been very useful and we as a group have had an easier time to actually start our planning and making decisions around things. This planning will ensure that we get the final result that we were looking for and we will also be more prepared is something goes wrong during the shot. Overall the research and planning might seem a lot of work but we all know from personal experience from last year that this is one of the most crucial steps before the shot day.

Cast list

During the past few days we have been asking different people that we think would look and fit good into our music video and after asking people about their skills and if they know the song and if they actually would like to participate in our video. We ended up by choosing for guys mostly thinking about their look but demanding them to at least look up some facts about the instrument they might be playing in the video.

Cast List
I'm not like everybody else - Infernal

Lead Singer – Philip von Drechsel

Bass – Merlin Talard

Guitar – Tom Evans

Drums – Will Bodnar - Horvath

Below is a picture of the feedback from our teacher, giving us the green light

Set design

Today during the lesson me and Teodora worked were hard on finishing our "set design" deciding upon what colours and lighting we wanted to use in our set in the studio. So we decided that we wanted natural lighting and have a key light that gives a theatrical light, the light is coming from a high angle straight on the band performing. And we are also using a back light that we want to be light and gentle so we can still see the background behind the band. The colours that we are using are metal grey and a darker blue to get the right feel that the band are in a junk yard and we might also use a smashed car behind the band playing which we are trying to get in a bright colour like red to make it really stand out in the background, this is to help the audience understand our idea and get the preferred reading that we as a group are hoping for the audience to understand.

Here is a picture of the set that we designed and here we can see more clearly what our idea looks like;

We also got feedback from Dan, the man who handles the lighting and so on and he said;
That he thought we should go with the idea of doing a more natural lighting to make it look like daylight and that we are actually recreating the scrap yard that we are filming the narrative. So instead of doing a performance based lighting we are trying to get a more natural feel to it though we're still using a back and a key light in the shot. Dan also agreed on the choice of colours; metal grey and darker blue and thought that the idea of getting a bright colour on the vehicle in the background would fit really well.These type of techniques will help the audience to believe in the location and therefore also get more involved in the performance and the possibly the band.

Here's the feedback from Dan; me asking the questions and Teodora filming

Shooting schedule

To be extra prepared we have to finishe a breif/draft shooting schedule to know how the day might look and to know how little time we have in different location;

8:30 – Meeting at the studio with crew and cast informing about the day

8:45 – Costumes and make-up

9:00 – Set up the props

9:30 – Set up cameras and lighting

10:00 – Shoot starts – live performance shots
wide shots of band
close-up on all the different band members
high angle shot of the band
low angle shot of drummer
shot of drumer from behind
mid-shot on guitar and bass both together and separate
tracking shot around the lead singer

13:00 – Lunch Time

13:30 – Depart from school to scrap yard

13:45- Arrive at scrap yard

14:00 – Shots of scooter driving outside scrap yard and arriving there
Tracking shot
mid shot
close-up on driver
from above and behind see the scooter driving away

15:00 – Scooter in the scrap yard
point of view shot on scooter arriving at the junk yard

15:30 – Narrative shots – playing cards, shots in car, playing around
close-up on all the people playing card both separate and together
mid-shot on all the band members playing card together
close-up on card and poker chips
facial reactions close-up

17:30 – Girls running towards band creating a bit of kaos
point of view seeing girls approcing both long and mid shot
see the boys band members reacting on the girls approcing
close-up on girls getting exited
mid shot girls starting to run
long shot seeing the boys standing up starting to run the other way
Both the girls and boys in the same shot, long shot seeing the girls chasing the boys

18:00 – Back at school

Costume list

When deciding upon what costumes to use we research thoroughly into what the mod culture represents regarding clothes and their particular style. This was important since we are trying to convince the bands star image as being a mod band and also caring about how they look and what they ware. Therefore we also looked at everything from shirts, belts to shoes to really get the mise en scene right and to really give the message of mod out to the audience.
Here is the list of what costumes we are using for the music video both girl and boys;

• 4 Bowler Hats
• 4 pairs of black trousers; Chinos
• 4 white collared shirts
• 4 black ties
• 4 pairs of Chelsea boots
• For the girls – mini-dress, mod style, white boots or sandals

 

Props list

To really succeed with the mise en scene of the music video we didn’t only have to think the costumes through but also what props we are using in the music video to be sure we have included all we need in the video.

We started by writing down the most obvious thing such as the instrument that we will need for the music video, and then we started our research into what we might need for the narrative in the music video.  We came out with the basic stuff that didn’t have to be look through that much such a deck of cards. But then for example we needed chairs and a table which meant that to fit into the shoot; we needed to find 4 chairs and a table that would fulfil the mise en scene of the junk yard as if they had find it in the junk yard and not as if they brought them there.
Overall we knew quite well what we needed and what things that would complete the mise en scene and make it look `real´ to the audience.
Here is the list of all the props we are using in the music video;

• Scooter(s) – mod                                        ---->
• Table where they will be playing cards
• Four chairs (black ones or black stools)
• Set of cards
• Some poker chips
• Empty beer bottles
• Some cigarettes + a lighter
• 4 baseball bats
• For the studio (trash looking like the junk yard)
• Instruments – drums, guitar, bass guitar and a microphone on a stand

Digipak development and research

Evaluation of animatic

When we started to do the storyboarding we had a hard time deciding upon if we wanted live performance and in that case how much. We all went away and drew what we thought should be in the music video, of course taking the initial mod idea into consideration. We then choose the parts that we liked and put them on a bigger sheet of paper were we could get a better overview and the filming was then in progress.

We then used the shots in the editing program putting them together as basic as we thought we wanted it but then we had some problems. But before we started putting the shots out we marked the beats of the song to try making the editing quite flowing which made us shorten the shots to much which then caused us problems having too few shots to finish the song. We then had to decide to use more live performance then we planned but we then thought it turned out to the better and we were all satisfied with the result. The live performance we feel are the strength in our music video while the narrative is the part that has to be better planned through before the final shot day, what I mean is more precise shots.

Overall we are going with the idea of editing to the beat of the song and might go for quite quick shots though still not faster than the actual melody of the song but we might have a very regular transition between the narrative and the live performance. Since I thought that when we were using three narrative and then three live performance regularly in the storyboarding animation was really making the video interesting we decided to apply this to the real music video as well.
We also got some feedback on our idea and our animatic, so they proposed that we could use a camera when we filming the scooter which we would tie to the helmet of the driver and therefore give some cool shots as a point of view of the driver. But overall they thought that or idea was possible and that they only thing we need right now is the confirmation of being able to use the scrap yard.

Finished storyboarding

Here is the finished product of our storyboarding that we have now edited together

By creating a storyboard for our music video we will clearly know what shots we want to use on our shot day, also if any key person would be missing we can always refer back to the storyboard to clearly know what we are suppose to be shooting. By the putting them together into a animatic's it gives us a group a preview of our finished product and if there is anything we see that we might be missing out on our that doesn't look as good as we thought we can take it out and replace it with something better.

Editing of storyboarding

After filming our storyboarding we have now started to edit it in the editing suite. Since our song I’m not like everybody else has a lot of beat in it we thought it would fit well to edit according to the beat to make the editing a bit smoother. This will also help the viewer/audience to automatically think well and in most cases like the way we edited it since it fits well to the music and the actual song.

So to make this easier we use something called markers in the editing program, we then put out the markers every time we hear a specific beat that we feel an edit should be done. We then put in the frames according to the markers and cut them down to the length that we want them to be. What has now happened that we wasn’t predicting before is that we are going be using a lot more frames than we planned but this was easily solved since we wanted to use the performance act a bit more that we could fit in before. Below is also a video of us working on the editing for the storyboarding.

Storyboarding

During the last week we have as a group worked on our storyboarding and how our music video might look like as an end result. We started by just throwing out ideas and then putting them on paper in terms of pictures we then cut all of the different frames out and put them on a bigger sheet of paper in the order we would like them according to the song.

When we finished this we filmed each frame for ten seconds and in order so we later could edit this and put it together as a little film making it as a preview of our music video, it was a lot of work and above all team work but we finished on time. Here is a photo of how it looked like when we were filming the storyboarding;

 (me writing the details for the different frames)

Media in the online age

During Fridays lesson our teacher introduced the exam topic "media in the online age" to us and showed us a clip from Youtube which I though was were interesting. It's a man called Michael Wesch that is stating that we are the media but at the same that the media is using us;