Finished A2 Music Video

This Is It:

Thanks to everyone

The Finished Evaluation

Well considering i had a sound issue on the orginal evaluation and that sort of failed i decided to refilm the evaluation again and this time section it into smaller sections and then edit them together

But here you go one finished and sound checked evaluation:

After all of the hard work............all i can say is super long evaluations are a thing

You thought i was done with the digipak but wait theres more!!!

In the process of designing the digipak i asked liam if he thought a simple infomation booklet might be a good addition to our content, he agreed and we worked on it, the booklet is quite short but says everything it needs to about the artist

These images above are the front and back cover for the booklet

The above image is the centre part of the booklet and gives a quick biography on seal and his career

CD Extras

Because of our music videos having to be submited by cd we know that from last year we are able to enter a deleted scenes or blooper reel part of the music videos which can also show some of the shots we actually got but either didn't use or couldn't be used due to lack of space or timing in the music video.

i would like to show some of the quite funny bloopers, like the camera being on because i didn't switch it off and we end up partially discussing a scene whilst the camera is pointed at my chest, and the scene where max gets slapped but it fails because of the angle, and of course the transistion from a filming location which features some funny comments

it will also include the infamous blue films of doom which liam filmed whilst i was ill one week and somehow the filming all comes up blue:

here is our extras and bloopers:

First evaluation issues

Whilst filming my evaluation, i discovered that the audio from my microphone either failed during the recording or the sound pick-up on it had been reduced as the sound from the microphone was minimal, even after trying to adjust and boost the sound of my evaluation, i've found that my efforts have been somewhat wasted, therefore i will be re-filming my evaluation during this week with all equipment in working order, now i know i didn't have to mention a failed attempt like this however i feel that having what could be considered a draft evaluation seems like a good idea.

The new evaluation will be posted by friday 18th of april and will be considerably shorter than the previous failed attempt, the new version will be done in sections in order to allow me to check them over again once done.

Evaluation Time.....Well sort of.....the sound seems to have failed

It only seems like yesterday that i started this project and now it's nearly finished after a few tweaks here and there and so whilst setting the record for the longest evaluation in history....yes it's like 50 minutes long i give lots of infomation about the finished product as well as my personal thoughts:

There has been a sound failure throughout the entire video so if possible i'd like this particular attempt to be disreguarded towards my actual project and i uploaded it to show that the evaluation can and will be improved

A2 Media Evaluation Sound Failure

Pre-evaluation thoughts

Considering we have completed the music video and the accompanying tasks, all that remains is to now do the evaluation of my work over the last year, it is imperative that i answer the questions, in the most efficient way possible, considering there are only four questions to answer it should only take thirty minutes to around sixty minutes depending on how much detail i choose to answer my questions with.

The things i'll discuss will include my personal involvement, the group work, casting, technologies used, the things i learnt and what i will do if i could do it again.

I'm personally looking forward to finishing the product

Poster design and thoughts

This here is our advertisement/poster for our music video and digipak, now some might say that the construction of it is basic and not really professional, however i have to disagree, firstly myself and Liam have kept to the basic principals of the soul genre by making the advertisement simple but we used the image of a heart as a representation of of the pop genre which is something that is varied and different between different artists, the use of the itunes download label also informs people that they can acquire the music from itunes, which is really helpful for trying to promote a album/song, the disadvantages of our poster would be that the lack of bright and varied colours means that people will ignore the poster because it doesn't hold their attention as well as the limited font colours which also take away from the pick-up-ability of the product, however the advantages are it stays true to it's genre roots and i'm quite happy about that, secondly the design is simple and that means people should instantly recognise the poster as well as the use of the heart which lists both the song name and the artist.

overall i feel that the poster was well thought out and in keeping with our genre which is important because i wouldn't want to use rock or punk genre advertising features on a soul-pop genre song.

Creating the digipak part 2

Because we needed to design a digipak, myself and liam decided that a 2x3 design was the best possible digipak, so i was put in charge of designing the potential digipak, myself and liam pre-selected the images and i then arranged them where i thought they should go and think the overall product looks great, i think if it were to be produced and given proper time and materials for an official printing then it would be amazing

As you can see above i have started with the front cover which is the heart design myself and liam worked on it seems like quite good idea and it seemed a shame to waste it.

the above images here are what you see when you unfold the first section of the digipak, i like this particular set up for the images because it shows togetherness and it makes me happy to see such love displayed in image form, so even though the video shows negatives, felt i should show positives on the inside(almost like a metaphor if you will)

The inside of the fully unfolded digipak as seen above is rather interesting, of course the cd is about 2-3 centimeters off in terms of size however since this is just a visual representation of the actual digipak i decided to let the size difference slide just this once because my focus was more on the imagery used for the actual digipak, the inside is great, one side shows a loving relationship, the other shows heartbreak and loneliness, almost like the 2 paths of love, on either side of the cd(i think i'm also looking to leave a message with the person viewing the digipak)

The above image is the digipak outside when unfolded, the image of the phone is important as it was a main source of conflict in the music video as well as something that allows people to communicate, i felt it was also a good choice to display a song list as it seemed to be a great idea, i also think the image is great at portraying choice(as in choice of song from the list or choice of who max's character wishes to speak to)

All in all designing the digipak with liam was quite fun as it mean being a little bit creative with a psychical project as opposed to a digital one, not to say that we also haven't put the digipak online, myself and liam felt a psychical representation might help us for future reference.

Creating the digipak part 1

Today i started to assemble the digipak, myself and liam have decided to go with the 2x3 design and that required us to assemble 4 images along with the front and back cover, these are some of the images we considered using:

Our poster and cover for the digipak

The image to my left is the base design for the album poster as well as cover for the digipak, myself and Liam felt that this was the most interesting design we could produce and it keeps to the connotations of Soul/Pop where it's basic but at the same time exciting to look at

The image to the left here is the official album poster for our group, we really like the basic design which is crafted into the shape of a heart, this is to relate to the song "all for love", Liam actually crafted the main idea after he suggested that it would play more to our genre if we used something simple but something people understood, most people know the shape of a heart drawn for love purposes looks like our design and so we decided that this would work as promotional material as well as a possible front cover, the main point of this advertising material is that there is no need to write the album name or the song name in some forgotten corner of the space available, this design also allowed us to incorporate the title of the album/song and the add the artist name, this amazing design was engineered through trial and error on photoshop

Ideas for our digipak template(drafting design)

Here are some of our ideas for the digipak template designs, we tried to focus on the subject of broken love for the images on the digipak

Poster ideas and research

In terms of creating our poster we are decided to look at any other soul artists who have posters and album release images, in terms of the soul genre it's seemed rather limited but myself and Liam finally settled on Adele, and the poster promoting the release of the album "21" now in keeping with the simplicity of the soul genre there isn't a lot of colour on the poster, there is a simple photograph of Adele which is in black and white which is really interesting, i was unable to determine if this was to create some form of dramatic impact or if it was just because it was a really well taken image.

The use of simple colours has been a recurrence in anything to do with the soul genre, as with the Marvin Gaye digipak, the Adele album advert is simple but professional, which shows a degree of class, where as the other album promotions I've seen use Lot's of colour and artist images however they do look good it's just that there's too much going on in the images, seeing as All For Love is a soul-pop mixture, the layout should be simple but with the vibrant colours of the pop genre.

Another poster that we looked at was the green day poster for ideas for comparisons, the differences are quite interesting, firstly rock genre posters tend to be more abstract and not denote a meaning, there is a use of darker colours which i think is very common with that particular genre, most rock bands are portrayed as dark and loud.

Also we looked at pink's poster for "Funhouse" which is a very basic poster which has an image of the artist and there is beige/light coffee colour which is striped with pink colours to give a circus-like image for the back ground and in line with that it also uses a comical "fun-style" font which makes the artist seem youthful.

another poster we looked at was the gorillaz is very interesting, it has an island on the sea, now looking at the poster, it appears the island might be made of plastic, and this may reflect the album name on the poster, it's very vivid with the colours, however they don't promote a track from the actual album which i found interesting.

In terms of a font for our poster there are a range of fonts we could potentially use but i think something simple and possibly a little bit casual would possibly be the way to go with our promotional material, and possibly putting relevant information in a different colour to the main text would also help

So what myself and Liam will have to produce for this particular poster/advertisement because
that's what it effectively becomes, we need something with simple images but with nice bright colours(pinks,greens blues) and it also needs to look professional

Costumes for the filming process

For the music video we obviously needed to have costumes for the characters because obviously we can't have have naked actors, so the basic costume ideas are as follows:

Female Character(flashback)
Blue coat
Black trousers
hair is a different colour or style to the present time

Male Character(flashback)
Black trousers
Brown Shoes
Cardigan

Female Character(Present Time)

Blue coat:

Black trousers
black shoes

Male Character(Present Time)

Bag

Black trousers

Brown Shoes

Black coat

as you can see there is not a lot in terms of costumes but there are a few changes in parts of the music video and i figured i should highlight them, as well as giving a costume list of my actors

Digipak comparison and research

Today me and Liam decided to begin the process of beginning the auxiliary tasks by doing some research into digipaks.

For those of use who don't know what a digipak is it's effectively a really fancy CD cover for a music CD, this is usually done for contemplations like greatest hits or on the occasional album.

In terms of most digipaks they often depict random images or things associated with the artist or group, and with different musical genres comes different styles of digipak for example a soul genre digipak is completely different to a pop style digipak, for example Marvin Gaye's digipak is simple and uses a small amount of colours and keeps the overall digipak simple with images of himself, whereas someone like Katy perry has a digipak is colourful and uses abstract images like ribbon candies and doughnuts 

So what this tells us is that soul artists are more focused on the musical side of the whole artistic process, whereas the main focus on a pop CD is the imagery used.

This is important for when we come to create our digipak as we will have to keep the designs simple but be able to show some stunning imagery, to this end i will suggest possibly doing some image overlay work to mix images together and them fade them so that they look really nice on the digipak we are currently creating.

Even though we aren't doing other genres besides soul and a little bit of pop myself and liam felt the need to compare digipaks of other genres to both our soul genre digipak as well as the few pop digipaks we are looking at, for example we used legendary reggae artist bob marley's digipak to compare to the soul based marvin gaye digipak, with the bob marley digipak there are heavy influences of rastafrian colours and alot of imagery relating to bob marley which whilst some might say is a little over the top, but the way the images of bob marley are assembled resembles the shape of a CD, which is really intresting, in terms of what the CD inside looks like it's very similar to a old style record which is usually used by star mark comptenplations as a greatest hits CD cover.

In comparison the marvin gaye digipak looks almost dim and lifeless in comparison but what you need to remember is that the simple digipak can also look just as amazing just because of the simple use of colours and not the over-done colours of some other digipaks

After this research i've learned that mine and liams digipak will have to be subtle but colourful as we try to design a nice digipak for seal.

Continuing the process part two and finished film draft

As of today myself and liam are currently finishing of the editing of our filming process, due to some cast issues and me being at higher education interviews there was a slow down in work spped, however we actually finished filming on the wedensday of last week and the editing was finished on the thursday after a hard fought finishing process, myself and liam have worked quite hard on the editing process and after we finished the editing we began looking at developing promotional material and that is where we happen to be up to at the present time, i've enjoyed my work as a cameraman(as 1 of 2 in the grouup)

The current Music video as of the 18th of march

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXrHCaQFKmI

Continuing the process part one and partial music video edit

Today, me and Liam decided to look over the draft 2 piece again today to determine if we wanted to change anything or make an addition to the shots used or showing other perspectives in the current draft, we decided that the male did get a little bit too much walking time within the 3 minutes on the second rough draft, so for the next edit we'll be dropping this amount of screen time by at least a third, of course this was the plan as some of those shots where being used as placeholders for last bits of footage that we are working on.

Wednesday of this week hails the final day of filming for our music video, this is because we have a majority of what we need to make the music video however, there are some shots that need to be re-done and there are some other shots that haven't been film yet, however this is good news as it means we can be finished with the editing process by Monday at the very latest, this will allow us time to work on the next two tasks.

Back to filming

After our 1 week off for our school holiday, myself and Liam have made some small edits to our original  plan and how we would go about filming this.

The first major shift being the bus station, i was aware of the issue that to film in a public place you need the permission of either people around you and the owner of the location(Wolverhampton bus station was in the care of centro but they didn't list a particular person to speak to, i did how ever send them an email to ask for permission to use a small area of the bus station, this email i was told would be replied to within 10 working days, i have yet to receive a reply to my request and as such we feel that the expense in transporting ourselves and the actors) to counter this issue me and Liam decided to change that scene location to a bus stop nearby, it's large enough to film in there and we can also use the shops nearby for max to receive the gift.

apart from this the filming is progressing well and we hope to be finished with our editing in 2 weeks time

The First Edit of our editing process

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPkHIl-K1Bo

While we haven't finished all of the editing yet, me and Liam have decided to show the progress of our editing work by releasing what we have edited at times, so this is the first edit, at the moment we are using the premise of alone, remembrance or unloved in black and white, we feel this is how a person feels before they experience love, while we show love and affection through the addition of colours

Progress on the original plan

a week and half ago i was unable to attend my media session due to a higher education interview/audition, so i was about 90 miles from Wolverhampton in Manchester, so Liam as the director and social face of our team decided to take it upon himself to sort out the original casting issue, i was unaware of this until i finished my interview at 4pm so i decided to check my phone and Liam informed me of his work, which i was very pleased about, as the problem had been dealt with i was looking forward to re-commencing the filming process

Storyboard Run-through

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovstn5IrxWw

Here is the storyboard that me and Liam produced and i provide audio description to explain the music video plan

Filming Begins

Today myself and Liam began filming our music video, due to our limited space to film we decided that my lip-syncing work should be filmed today due to our limited time as well.

I feel that the process went well and whilst we did only a little bit today it's a good start and hopefully spells out good things for the rest of the process, in terms of further work this week Liam will be producing a sort of collage of some of the filming, and commentate on it as i will be otherwise engaged with other commitments, however i should be back next week to add some additional work and the return of the on-location videos

How the new music video plan works out

After Thursday's session media myself and Liam decided to try and do some filming whilst i explained my new idea which was an Internet romance and then heartbreak idea, which Liam thought was a good idea, i explained that the advantages of it were that it was modern but something that hasn't really been done, and because of the use of the Internet it can be done by 1 person and a camera man, which really helped us a lot.

So it basically works by having Liam as the main character who through facebook meets a girl(who will be a fake profile that we will be creating for the sole purpose of the media project and will then proceed to terminate the profile after filming is finished, after a few conversations they flirt a little bit and then he decides he would like to meet her in person(which leads to a long wait and when she doesn't show up he shows signs of being upset)
after this he says that he loves her but he's hurting to the degree where she then says she likes him but she just wants to be friends(which happens a lot these days)

after this he will switch off the computer, i will be doing a cameo to a degree where I'll be lip-syncing the song, because of this i will have to sing it so my mouth matches up to the words, apart from that filming should start on Monday with no further issues

Re-writing the story of our music video

Our music video idea was originally well thought out and we planned well for what we could at the time we concieved the ideas in our group, certain things have affected that however me and liam have agreed to do a re-write that would only require us two to do filming, which makes everything so much easier to finish to a hight standard, the new idea we will be basing the film around is an online dating sort of romance, this is because online dating is a big thing nowadays and people who would never have met can find people who are very like minded, not all love stories will have a happy ending, in the case of ours the person liam will be talking to will either reject him outright or be some scammer from a distant land, and i will also be doing a small performance part and singing for parts of the music video.

The overall filming time should be 1-1 1/2 hours and we plan to shoot the majority of things near some form of computer.

in further posts there will be some video and on scene takes to show our development to the finished project.

Working out another way of doing things

After some deliberation, me and liam agreed that the music video idea that we came up with was limited because we tried to stick to the idea of a love story but forgot that we could produce an abstract video or one where the singer is shown to sing or dance or even both, with this it means a re-write of our music video and changing from a narrative to a performance based video.

we understand that we happen to be working to a deadline, however I'd rather spend 2 days of doing a re-write and only needing 1 maybe 2 people to film than spend 3 or 4 more weeks waiting on cast members who will waste time, and because me and liam agreed on this a slight re-write will be needed but not too much of one which is really nice.

Encountering Difficulties

A few weeks ago we finished creating our storyboards and ideas for the music video and we sorted out casting and everything else, so me and liam booked a camera out so we could do some filming before Christmas.

The problem is after that casting was suddenly an issue and even though we tried to sort it out we did find ourselves at a point of stagnation, in order to try and resolve this i suggested liam take the role as the male actor as this solved about a fourth of the overall issue, the actual trouble has been in finding a female cast member who has some time on their hands, i recently suggested to liam that if we couldn't find anyone by the end of the penultimate week of January then we either needed to rethink our idea or re-write it so only one actor is required, of course we will be trying to to keep our original idea but in the worst case scenario, it will end up being re-worked and still based on All For Love By Seal.