preliminary video

As a practice For my main video me and a peer decided to make a sweded film tailer for 'Harry Potter and the philosophers stone' we tried to use a range of techniques and shots so that we would get as much practice as possible for our main video. It was a lot of fun to make and has given me a lot of ideas for my main video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ZwuVO_jmw

Editing

me and my partner have just recently finished editing and alternated time on the laptop where both myself and my partner took it in turns to edit, sometimes we had disagreements but we would both edit that part and decide whose was better. We looked at previous assignments and asked for help with some of the band footage as the background wasn't dark enough for us. We were fortunate enough to get feedback from other media students to drop the brightness and slightly increase contrast to give a more live raw feel to the band and decrease the backgrounds brightness. Looking at other music videos with how they have cut and fitted the story in with the music was important. Also by fitting the instruments with the timing of the song and making sure that it was the correct time for that instrument to begin playing. We are now just fitting the titles for our media video and also burning to disc, the following music videos are the ones researched and what i have gained from watching them.

Bloc Party Banquet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5Li08_ie8

We tried to record many angles similar to the banquet video but our equipment wasn't as good nore was the resources available but we have been editing in similar ways by making quick, fast and straight cuts to keep the tempo of the song going fairly fast. The only transitions that were used was "overlap" and this was in our story section of the music video.

We did try having the band footage in black and white but due to the quality of the camera and the movement from the band shots there was alot of blur motivation and didnt look professional enough to us.

Arctic Monkeys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEukS2YN9B8

This is the original music video for the song that we are doing. It is a story where a girl is desperate for a man and try extreme lengths to get one. We took this idea and changed it to where a main cannot decided what girl he wants and the story unfolds during the video.

There are alot of straight cuts in this music video to ensure the tempo and during the long shots that are in there, there are right to left push tranisitions and alot of "Flashes" to create a similar effect to an instant fade in. We have used many straight cuts in our music video similar to the original and instead of the few push transitions we used "overlap"

Advertising research

To make my advertising page as best as possible me and my partner put a lot of effort into research, we felt that researching the correct advertising for our genre would make it a whole lot easier to create an advertisement. Most bands of this genre are made to look really urban when advertised about we took this into account when creating our own. bright colors are used to express words of meaning we have also took this into account!

Final Advertisement

This is my final advertisement for my Band..

I have decided to keep it very basic but feel at the same time it is still very effective.

I used two actors that featured in the song video and got them to bite the album cover which I used for the music video itself. I feel that this has a really good efffect for the advert as a band cant be better advertised than actually using the band in person!

I used the advert to full advertise the bands album that I have created but wanted to give a good feel about the band to the audience therefore I used a humerous picture...

Hope you enjoy!

Album cover research

During our research we tried coming up with controversial album covers to reflect the band, then we both decided to recreate the original album cover and slightly change it. The other idea was to just create a similar album cover to the rest of the genre and have the bands name in a different text with a contrasting background.

The idea is to have a med to close up photo of a male smoking. with the band name in a different style of front compared to other bands to create a identity and to make sure it is on a contrasting background to stand out to the audience.

Album Cover

This is my final piece album cover. I used photoshop to make the album cover, I used certain features in photoshop to make my album cover better than the original such as skin healing etc. I feel my final piece has a better effect than the arctic monkeys one itself. I got the writing from a website called tatoowriting.com it let you write a sentence then transform it to what ever style of writing you wanted, then you just copy and paste to wherever you want!

Drafting album cover

In todays lesson I have drafted an album cover on photoshop just to get a real feel of what I will be doing etc. I feel strongly that I know exactly what i'll be doing for an album cover, Me and my partner have agreed on pictures and text also.

Team work recording

We are nearly finished our recording now, only one more shot to catch as the last time we caught it wasnt quite what we wanted, we are now editing and will edit in the last shot at a later date. The following pictures are of me and danny filming and editing our music video.

In this shot Danny is filming a close up of the lead singer in the music video. Danny is holding hes phone in hes left hand as he was playing the music for the video from it so that the lead singer was definitley singing in time, this makes editing a whole lot easier.

In this shot I am tilting the camera backwards in front of the lead singer to make him look more dominant in the shot.

In this shot we are beggining our editing, we are talking about what scenes we should keep and wether the scenes are good enough to use in the video, if we do this together its alot more effective and we can both put equal amounts of work in.

Adding to album covers!

I have been looking at album covers in a similar category of genre to mine, this is too see what the bands use to reach out to there audience and how they grab there audience in to buy there album, I feel that looking at a band that are in the same genre as mine will be good as I will be looking to use similar techniques as them when designing my album cover.

Both bands have relatively simple album covers, with simple pictures and then the name of there band and the name of the album. I think the idea in the first album cover is to show off the bands name with it printed in large in the corner, where as in the second its to show more of the simplicity and qulaity of the band. I think this as the writing on the second album cover is in italic and is farely difficult to read at a quick glimpse.

Both album covers are named after a song on the album I will have to consider this when designing my album cover, as the name of the album will definitlely prove all important.

Album covers...

In trying to achieve an album cover that is effective, I have deccided to look at other effective and famous album covers. Hopefully this will help me to understand the way in which I should use phtographs etc.. It will also help me to recognise what helps the album cover to be extremely famous and well known.

The first picture is argued to be one of the best well known album covers ever, it is well known all over the world, I know this as people come to london and pose on this very zebra crossing for this very same picture. But why is it so famous and well know? I think the reason in which the album cover is so big maybe because the actual band in themselves were huge and well loved everywhere, but the cover is so simple yet effective. The picture shows the band walking across a zebra crossing and features the name of the band only in the corner, there is nothing flash but it can connect with any audience simply because of this.

The second album cover is for a rock/dance band, they are also an extremely well known band all round the world but there cover is a little more extreme just like there music. They have used a strange picture as there cover almost as if to show that there music is maybe strange and out of the ordinary too. Its extremely effective though, as it is so different it draws you in straight away and makes you want to take a closer look.

I will take both of these features (simple yet easy to relate too, out of the ordinary) into consideration when designing my album cover, as they are both very effective but in very differnet ways, maybe if i can combine the two mine will be even bigger?

Advert and album cover..

I will be looking and researching adverts and album covers and i will be using ADOBE PHOTOSHOP to create both products. I will need to create an identity for the band, look for music genre style and trends. I will create my album cover first and the following post will contain my research.

Recent class work

In recent class work we have been looking at amateur filming compared to proffesional filming. We watched a television programme called the gadget show, on the show the two presenters had the choice to either make an amateur film or a proffessional film, once they had decided and made the films the difference was incredible, it allowed us to see the difference in quality betweeen the films but it also gave us many ideas for our own video. The presenter who made the amateur video used new techniques to achieve different shots, such as putting the camera on a remote control helicopter to achieve high shots ect. This has made me start to think outside the box as im now wanting to achieve a much better range of shots in different ways...

Filming and Actors

During the planning of the music video we both had an idea of who will be available and be the best possible actor for the roles we had. We needed four boys minimum for the band action and all needed to look like the band genre,

Once we found the four memembers we identified that many of the music videos including gigs their clothing was always very casual, The way they have their guitars being held was also a factor they have their guitars very high up compared to other rock genres.
The other two girl characters that we needed also had to suit this genre the picture below shows the type of clothing that they would need for effective M-E-S.