The Digipak Design Process

Over the last few lessons, Stan and myself have taken on the role of designing the digipak and, using the Photoshop software on the Macs, recreating these designs into a professional, usable form.

Our original designs (displayed in the previous digipak update) depict a fruit bowl on the front. We plan to use an SLR camera to capture a fruit bowl image. We can then upload this image to Photoshop. Using the SLR camera will give us a high quality image which will allow us to expand it or shrink it without distortion.

We have already been experimenting with Photoshop and have created a great platform for the fruit bowl image to be layed on. This platform consists of a black background, the song title and band name in the official 'Vampire Weekend' font, and also a splattering effect that we are experimenting with as well.

We seem to be developing our digipak well despite Photoshop being a very complicated program to use. I will keep you updated on any digipak developments.

Oli

Saturday 29th of January - The Big Day!

So we now have a shoot date!

After our thorough practice shoot we managed to get some great shots and experiment with some very interesting camera angles. All of which will be taken into consideration come Saturday. We really feel that the practice shoot was invaluable to our production, as the practical experience in the field stimulated more planning and creative thought.

We are especially pleased with our costumes, that arrived in the nick of time. They are much better than we expected, creating a comic atmosphere, which in turn is reflected within the shots we recorded. We are also pleased with some discoveries we made during the practise shoot. These discoveries included using the sunlight to create a natural haze to our shots. We hope to imitate this on Saturday by filming at a similar time (1-3pm) when the sun is at the perfect position. Obviously, we cannot completely rely on the weather to come through for us and therefore we do have a back up plan. If the sun doesn't appear during our shoot then we will replicate the haze during editing.

On Saturday, we plan to shoot in Nowton Park, in the large open areas. As you will be able to see in my previous location post, Nowton Park provides an unbeatable compromise between convenience, features and the fact that it will be an unrecognisable location (promoting a professional look). We have also roped in an experienced actor (when it comes to media productions) in the form of Luke Pilkington-Amps, who has played the protagonist in no less than three productions. He will be joining Stan and myself (as we have also acted in media productions before) as the main characters. Stan and I will take responsibility for as much camerawork as possible (when we are not in front of the camera), as we will spending the majority of the time acting.

We have planned this shoot well and hope it will be a great success, providing us with some great shots and room to play with during post production. I will post on how the shoot goes after Saturday. I'm sure it will be successful.

Oli

Filming schedule

Last Wednesday (19th January) we were able to film a few scenes and experiment with some new ideas for the video.
It was the first time we had been able to film with all of the costumes, and it turned out to be very successful. It was exciting for us to see that the costumes provide the sense of energy and fun we were looking for, matching the songs upbeat and fast-paced style.
We were able to film a variety of shots that we felt matched the atmosphere of the song, following the style of Goodwin's idea of 'a relationship between music and visuals' as a music video technique.
Along with filming some footage, this also gave us an opportunity to see what would and woudn't work in future shooting. We discovered some new shots that we feel would work perfectly in the video, and others that either weren't right for the video, or that we wouldn't be able to shoot for other reasons (such as lack of funds).
Overall, this session was certainly successful. We hope to complete the filming process at our next scheduled session on Saturday 29th January.

Division Of Labour (Pre Production)

Over the next 3/4 weeks we will all be needed to complete large amount of work and putting lots of our time and effort into this project to make things click how we want. Knowing this I have decided to give each of our group set jobs to focus on for each lesson.

I have made it clear to everyone that we each need to have certain posts on the blog, Stan and myself have been posting a lot recently on directors and textual analysis that we have researched in our own time. Linking these to our own production, and trying to branch ideas off.

Stan has politely taken up the role of designing and publishing the website that he is producing on Wix. He will be posting more on that in the next few weeks and eventually should have a final piece ready for deadline day.

As Oli and Stan were two of the actors in film and Natalie was unable to make filming due to other commitments I gladly took up the role of directing the video. After completed the filming process I will move on to editing the film. First starting by uploading footage to the iMac's in school and then designating as much time as possible to the project.

As I will be editing the footage, Oli and Nat have been given the tedious task of designing the digipak for the band. They will be using Photoshop to design and produce the digipak.

Photoshop and Digipak update

In Thursday's lesson we had a Photoshop tutorial, where we attempted to get our collective heads around the seemingly endless functions of the programme. Despite learning how to use the basic tools of the programme, their is certainly a lot more to discover and a lot more we can get out of it.

One of the main uses of Photoshop in relation to the production of our music video is for our Digipak. Oli and I drew up a couple of designs for the front cover for our Digipak, which we have tried to recreate on Photoshop.

We liked the idea of a simple cover, with the band name and song title in plain font, with a fruit bowl in the middle of the cover. This links in with the main concept of our music video as well as providing an original, attractive cover.

We also decided on what features the Digipak should contain. Seeing as we're not the band that recorded the song there are a couple of restrictions, but we will include song lyrics and pictures related to the filming and production of the video, while maintaing the design features on the front cover.

Final Cut

Now we have come to the production stage of our coursework we are now being required to film and upload our footage, having the access to the iMac software in our school we have chosen to use the software Final Cut Express over iMovie as it offers us a wider range of options.

As we have never used this software before we have had to learn from everything from scratch. Last week we had practises with Final Cut to get use to it, we uploaded some previous student work from an old tape so that we could play around with the clips.

I have added screenshot showing sow of the basic skills we have covered in our lessons which we will need when using final cut.

This screenshot is just us uploading the footage we want into Final Cut, we found the best way to achieve this was to import files to iMovie, the same way as we did last year, and then import from iMovie across to Final Cut.

Above is just another screenshot of the importing process, basically I am just selecting the clips that I want from the iMovie event that I have highlighted.

As you can see in the top left corner of this screenshot we have now imported our chosen clips from iMovie, now we can edit them by clicking on a certain clip and it will appear in the middle screen (The Viewer). In here we can edit clips in many ways before we insert them into the reel.

This is the next stage, as you can see, we now have a clip in the reel along the bottom of the screen, the clip highlighted in the reel is then shown in the Canvas in the top right screen. We can use the canvas and the viewer to compare clips and effects. This is a very powerful tool that Final Cut can offer us over any other programme and is definitely something we will use a lot.

In this screenshot you can just see an example of me adding an effect to the clip I've highlighted. The useful thing to notice here and in the next screenshot is the ability we have to compare shots...

Here you can see I have added the effect to the clip. Now if I wanted to I could have the same clip again in the Viewer next to it. In this screenshot I did not do this but this is one feature of Final Cut that we must take full advantage of.

This is the process of adding new clips to the reel. In the viewer we have a clip, to add this to the reel below we click and drag the window over tot he right onto the canvas, we are then given the choices that you can see above when adding the clip, i.e. whether we would like transitions etc...

In this example I chose to add the clip with a transition. You can now see the transition on the reel, when highlighted we are then given the opportunity to edit these transitions. You can see an example of me where I am changing it from a straight cut. We will have to use a lot of different transitions throughout our video.

Overall I think we will manage very well with Final Cut, we have got some of our own footage on the Mac's now (These screenshots are old) and we are currently in the editing process which is going well. We hope using Final Cut we will be able to get the precise editing we are striving for and produce a great piece of work as a result of it.

Ian

Directors Study

This is just a heads up to any of you who didn't know that both Michel Gondry and Mark Romanek are releasing new films in the next couple of weeks.

Gondry's 'The Green Hornet', a high-octane comedy starring Seth Rogen, is set to be a box office hit and has an estimated budget of $90 million. The fact that he has been trusted with such an important and financially daunting project highlights just how successful he has been over the years, and is a true inspiration to our group.
This is the IMDb profile for the film:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0990407/

Mark Romanek's 'Never Let Me Go', which has already proved to be a huge success after being released in the US, is set for the same reception over here. The film has already been nominated for many awards and has been tipped by many for success at the Oscars.
This is the IMDb profile for the film:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1334260/

While this doesn't have any direct relevance to our music videos, both of these directors have been hugely influential in the production of our video, and it is interesting to follow their exploits in whichever form of media it is.

Analysis of previous student work

Viewing pervious student work cannot only inspire us with ideas to use in our own production, but also set us a standard to which we want our work to reach. Here is a video from 2006 and this is the music video that my Brother produced when he was in my very same position 5 years ago. After downloading the Hand-break application onto my Mac I have managed to burn this video from a DVD and have now uploaded it to YouTube.

This video is in many ways similar to what we hope to achieve. It also is a very fast paced song with lots of drum beats and guitar riffs. This video works to the song in the way that it is cleverly edited to the effect that the music creates. The bar location which is seen in this video was completely structured for the sake of the music video alone, with amazing attention to detail this video really shows use how much we can achieve in our production.

In particular I enjoy this video because of the precise and fine editing, for example the fast and slow effects that are used to great effect and the reference to the link between the audio and the visuals, for example when we see him (Tom) falling over in the streets to the lyrics, "I'm heading to crashland" at 1:51.

Some of the camera shots that are in this video are very creative, in the opening scene we have Tom in bed when gets up and leaves the room there is a clever transition of the shot were he walks into the camera and is then followed from behind. I think this is a very effective shot and unique which works well and I think we can use something similar to this in our production. Another shot I personally like is at 2:52 were the bottle is slid into the camera shot and creates a powerful straight cut which is timed excellently with the audio.

When filming and editing we will bear in mind to refer back to previous student work to adapt ideas from past successes.

Ian

Latest Update

In the past couple of days we have been working with past filming clips on the school's mac's to get an idea of how to adapt with the Mac's programmes to make our music video to the best of our abillity.
We will be using like every other group "final cut" which is a software on the Macs where we can edit filming to create a brilliant piece of media work. we have looked at past students work that have also used this software and have created some outstanding work, therfore we can be inspired by the work done by "final cut" into our music video.
recently we have looked at transitions and the different effects that we can use to create this fun, enthusiastic, edgy music video that we hope to share with other media students. we have played around with the transitions and effects with old clips so that we know clearly what to use with our clips when we come to edit. there is a lot to choose from which gives us an advantage to have fun with editing our video.

Textual Analysis Jay-Z 99 "problems"

We studied this music video in class when reviewing a range of Mark Romanek’s past work, and we came across some good use of camerawork and lighting which we would like to involve similarly in our “A punk” video.

Mes en scene:
The lyrics of the song portray a very specific genre of music, rap. Obviously the style of song is very different to our choice of music, however the use of space with his settings interested us to influence this in our music video. Romanek has taken great care of referring jay-z’s lyrics to the setting therefore sets the narrative of this music piece in New York City, which the lyrics refer to, a stereotypical gangster lifestyle. To address their status in jay-z’s well known hit “99 problems”, Romanek makes good use of props by this idea of gun use and money which is what we connote with a gangster. You can also get an idea of this lifestyle by the policeman who stops jay-z in his “pimped out” car with money in his boot which shows the audience the idea of drug dealing which also is connoted by gangsters. Jay-z is also portrayed as this gangster who is known globally as successful through his talent and has out beat his past life which we see when his name and face is on a televised pin bored in central park. From this video we have been inspired by the use of great detail of setting use as it does make that bigger difference when you can clearly see that time and effort has been done to get the best shots, therefore Romanek’s work has been inspiring, even though it’s a different genre song.

Editing and Lighting:
through out the music video Romanek has kept it black and white which is very effective especially in this style of music, because it can be used to refer to the idea of comparison of black and white culture which it is in some ways in this video. It also can be done to make the video edgy and also to make parts stand out, such as shadows. This helps with the choice of lighting too as Romanek has used a mixture of low key lighting high key lighting to create a particular appearance to the audience’s interest. Low key lighting is visible in parts of the video when danger is suggested for example; when the police stop jay-z in the car in a mysterious setting of blocks (flats) and metal staircases with “garbage bins” a stereotypical New York City setting. The low key lighting helps connote danger and crime.

Camerawork:
Romanek uses a lot of tilt shots so that the camera appears to be low and looking up at the big idle Jay-z himself, this gives jay-z as an artist power and status towards the audience. Tilt shots are very effective therefore could be fun to play around with in our media piece. Romanek also uses a great amount of close ups which is for obvious reasons by giving the audience clear shots of the star “Jay-z” this relates to one of Goodwin’s 6 of the record labels honor of the artist.

Textual analysis: Daft Punk - Around The World

I myself have found this Music Video really inspiring the minute I watched it in class when analyzing Michel Gondry’s work. Personally I think this is one of the best Music Videos Gondry has done because it’s unbelievably mesmerizing with the use of color, lighting, props, costumes and its concept. His ideas brought in this video has inspired our group to do something a little unusual for our Music Video by addressing the audience by using “wacky” costumes and to use visual effects.

Mise en Scene
Gondry has taken great amount of thought and precision in the way this Video was to look he noted his distinctive structure as, “I realized how genius and simple the music was. Only five different instruments, with very few patterns, each to create numerous possibilities of figures. Always using the repetition, and stopping just before it's too much." He represents each beat of the song with an individual or group of dancers, which builds up as the beats build up. He then gets the dancers to demonstrate the song by movement in a contract space. The space provided has been used really well, because it appears to the audience as though there is no way out of this world, which represents the title of the song. Gondry’s style and flavor is written all over this Music Video because it is an example of a surreal setting. The Lighting in this Video is very under lit, which could represent the “Bizarre” costumes as it wouldn’t have a huge effect if it was bright, because the darkness reflects on the performer’s status in the video. The use of color makes the video seem fun and lively, and it also represents the rhythm of the song as it’s very upbeat.

Camerawork
The song “Around the world” has influenced the camerawork used in the music video; Michel Gondry has used a lot of rotation shots to reinforce the word “around.” This shows relevance to the song and also makes the production smaller because we feel trapped by watching it, which is Michel’s idea of making the audience feel involved in the world created in the video. The use of rotation shots also help the repetition used as the Daft Punk soundtrack uses repetitive lyrics and beats. He also uses a lot of close ups especially on the groups i.e. the skeletons. This gives the audience a close up view of what is happening and what the group’s involvement is to the song, which we figure that their purpose is to represent a beat and rhythm. Mid shots are popular in this video too which are used primarily so that all dancers/groups have an impact, this would be when more than one beat is audible.

Lighting
The use of lighting is very effective as Michel Gondry has used bright on dark lighting. The use of bright colors makes uplift to the song as it is a upbeat song