Feedback

Lots of effort put into the video editing this week - the rough cut of the edit in particular.  Your blog is concise, you make some good points, but these are not followed up in terms of explanation, for example in design of the digipak.  You may want to go back and review such points.

Digipak

For the Digipak we decided to go for the more alternative, indie style design with the random imagery and the pak being made entirely out of cardboard because we feel our band is earthy and they want to do their part for the environment so recycled cardboard seemed like the best way to go. The font used is not fancy and not glossy because we don't want it to look mainstream in the slightest. Our disc is made to look like a vinyl so it is as "old school and original" as possible.

Prior to the design of this Digipak I did some research and found that the best Digipaks around are the ones that used the random approach such as anything from the streets and the arctic monkeys. Those are the groups that gave us inspiration for our Digipak.

We used Photoshop mainly to produce this media product along with actual drawings from Talisa in our group that are on the Front cover and Inside Left.

I feel this Digipak represents our band very closely. The band is about the music and not about what they look like, they are very pure meaning that no sounds in their music are electronically produced and all instrument based, this Digipak is pure, clean and basic just like out band.

All of the tasks we have been set over the course of this year have been perfect to deliver a new band to the market, a music video, Digipak and Poster are all the things an up and coming band need to get their careers as artists on the go.

We have not yet received any feedback on this product but will be looking to show it to some people in the near future. The particular audience for this band is much like the music they produce very independent and pure so I feel this design will really interest the audience that is out there.

I would perhaps change the fact that there is no imagery of the band although we wanted it this way thinking about it now because they are an up and coming band there should probably some form of band image on there but there is always space for that on the poster.

Using manually drawn art for the Digipak works really well I think and that is definitely a creative skill that was used on this Pak but as I mentioned before this Digipak was mainly produced on Photoshop where not so much of a creative skill but an understanding for the programme is needed.

Feedback

The presentation on CD digipak design is good and very informative of how you have developed your idea.  The product and poster needs to be posted next week with an evaluation.  The blog of the shoot day, needs better presentation and the evaluation is concise, you had a big role in the production day, but have not really blogged this  -you need to revise the evaluation carefully - link to production practices, what you did, consider the shot selection, mise en scene etc.

Rough Cut

With the rough cut almost finished we have realised that there are some issues that need to be dealt with such as matching the shots from the barn to the shots in the studio as one is very warm in colour and one is very cold. Once the cut is done we will be able to move the video into after affects and apply different feels to the video such as the field shots we are going to warm up and give a Super 8 feel so they look like they where shot on a film camera with film perhaps a little like that side of the video has been shot by a friend that is on site. Once we have overcome these issues we should have a pretty good video.

The Set

The build went well; our design for the set was a barn. The only issues we had was finding a company that could sell us bails of hay, all of the companies we initially called could only sell hay by the tone which clearly wasn’t what we needed. After searching far and wide we finally found a local farm that could sell us hay by the bail, 60 pounds later we had a finished set and something that resembled a barn.

Evaluation of shoot day.

Our shoot day went well, we started and finished pretty much on time. The studio stuff went really well and it all looked really nice the only issue we had was that our lead turned up late and then had a little problem with the lyrics that we didnt notice on the day but will have to try and fix or cover up in the edit. We then have all of our field stuff which you can see an image of above, this all went to plan and we only got kicked off of one persons land which I thought was good goinge. I do have one worry though and that is that the studio stuff and the feild stuff is going to look weird along side eachother but we will see when we come round to editing which will be soon. Over all the shoot went very well and I am looking forward to seeing the final product.

I operated the camera for the most part on the day of shooting as this is where I feel I have most knowledge and experience. The camera we used for this particular shoot was the Sony F3 shown in the image below

The reason we where aloud to shoot on this camera is because I had been able to use it prior to the shoot when we traveled to Italy to shoot a documentary with the Hurtwood Film Academy earlier this year. This camera is the higher end camera that the school owns and when used properly and treated properly in post can through out footage of cinema quality. Along with the F3 we also used another lower end of Sony camera to shoot the stuff in the field as the F3 would have been to much to cary around and set up with the little time we had. 

In the studio we used a Dolly to get the nice fluid tracking shots we wanted, having access to a dolly is a huge help as we didn't have to get one in ourselves. We looked over the shots earlier this week and the tracking shots look amazing thanks to this great piece of kit (Shown below)

CD Digipak research

CD Digipak research

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Letter to the label.

To XL Recordings,
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 part of this project:

Vampire Weekend, Run.

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 recognized 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

Niall Green, Talisa Bergsen and William Bodnar-Horvath

Hurtwood House School

Props and Costume

Animatic evaluation

After showing our animatic to the team at Hurtwood and getting their feedback on it me and my group decided that we have to many narratives going on so we decided to cut it down from 6 to 3 so we can film them in more detail.

We are shooting at the beginning of November meaning that the weather and lighting are probably going to be terrible which could change the video from happy and hippy to sad and dull which could be a big issue. We also have to be very careful that the video doesn't end up being cheesy.

Rough Cast List

Narrative (Field)

The list below is our cast list for our field scenes in the video, we need a fair amount of people for this part of the video to work as we need to create a crowd like atmosphere leading up the final scene outside the barn.

Ollie Baynham

Mina Hambro

Bella Speaight 

Plum O’Keeffe

Jess Adam

Georgina Morton

Kyle Foreman

Sola

Charlie Lindsay

Will Barlow

Sarah Findlay

Lavinia Di Loernzo

Daniela Wild

Josie Fellows

Ellie Wilson 

Simon Wood

Kate Boucher

Will Edgley 

Lillie Resta

Sunshine

Jana Page

Aimee Watts

Lara Pitctet

Band (Studio)

Below is the list of band members we would like for our video.

Patch Wadsworth

Jake Cecil

Rollo Spreckley

Freddie Dixon

Feedback

Your response is detailed and through and you have been creative with your blogs, I particularly like the use of layout and design which is good presentationYou have a secure knowledge and understanding of who you want your artist to be signed to; perhaps you could link this further by stressing the advantages that your artist has signed to the particular record label.  Your clearly identify your target audience and have profiled them well.  Good research into CD covers and you have a wide range of examples, and this would be developed further if you can link the real product to how it will influence your own designs.

Domino Records

We decided as a group that the best cmpany to represent our band would be Domino records, Domino is a british independent record label. Despite being independant they have branched out all over the world to such places as America, Germany and France. Domino Records have had a good run over the past with artists and bands such as The Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand and Queens of the Stone age.

DIGIpak First draft.

Here is my first design idea, following what I said on my last post about album covers I like and I feel would be a good start for this up and coming band. The image on this page although it was taken by me it has nothing to do with the band in question. The image is of a man walking alone up a steep hill, the picture has a lot of head space meaning that he is on a journey or perhaps "RUN"ning from something, The male is in silhouette form sort of conforming to what I said about him not being relevant to the band. "Cape Karoo" is the biggest writing as the band name is what we need people to remember and the Album name "Run" is the only writing the right way up because it is still important but smaller text.  

DIGIpak Covers

Album cover research.

Above are some album covers much like the one I feel we should have for our band this year. The images on the front of the DIGIpak have nothing to do with the band in question. Starting from the left The arctic monkeys CD cover; this has no album name and the male on the front is not even in the band he is simply a friend of the groups and I am sure if you dig around there is a valid story behind this image. Then we have vampire weekend the image is that of a chandelier and the framing is off meaning the picture is crooked and again has no album name or anything. Then we have the right image taken from the front cover of "Favorite worst nightmare" by the arctic monkeys; this again has an image that has nothing to do with the album or that band but some how works. With all the images on this page as references I think you can see for yourself where I think our DIGIpak should be heading.

Our Target Audience.

Below is what we feel is the criteria for the target audience of the band Cape Karoo that we have put together.

-  Both male and female audience between the ages of 17-35.
-  Underground and experimental music followers.
-  Blog followers.
-  Indie fans.
-  People who prefer the use of real instruments used creatively rather then fully electronic-produced.
-  Fans who appreciate music for the talent rather than the star image.
-  Festival goers (Glastonbury, Isle of White etc.)
-  Alternative and creative profiles ( artists, musicians etc.)

Targeting specific audiences means that we can work out a more effective marketing scheme. We will advertise this band using popular blogs we feel the target audience will keep an eye on as well as at festivals, underground events and also in magazines such as "indie" that I feel targets our audience directly.

The Treatment

The song we are thinking of doing is Run by Vampire Weekend. The reason why we chose this song is because it has a lot of different instruments which sits perfectly with our music video theme of the marching band.

We are planing of using random retro shots such as children at play etc. We want to do these shots with an over exposed sephia effect to give it a ''home-video'' feel.

We will use the idea of a marching band in the field, like in the music video I Love Your Smile.

We also want to include shots of the environment like the field, bicycles, closeups on flowers etc.

We are thinking of using various cameras for our shoot, because the desired effect isn't a perfect, clean shot, but rather a retro, indie feel.

Our song.

This our chosen song, Run by Vampire weekend. We chose this tune because it is fairly unique and really fits in with the video idea. Hippies, instruments, miles and miles of open land and friends, barns and a party all of which go hand in hand with this music genre and most importantly this song.

Levis- GoForth

Here is an inter-textual reference to our music video, the way it is shot is sort of what we are looking for very, independent. I think the main scene that we enjoy is the one with the feathers and I believe we are going to use this in our video. The run rise and the bon fires, the girl in the Indian style feather jacket in the wind and the cult followings- all of this will play a big part of our music video.

Prelim Evaluation.

Seeing as this was out first chance at shooting a music video or at least a section of a music video I feel it went quite well. We worked well as a team and had all of our shots planned which meant we could go straight in and get to work making our shooting time less leaving us with more time to edit.

Once we had finished filming we hit the edit suite to finish up, being the first group to shoot meant that we had more time to edit so we had no reason to worry about not finishing. We started with putting all the appropriate footage in the appropriate bins and then got on with the editing, we started with editing on the beat for the first few seconds as each instrument was introduced and then went into standered cuts and fades.

If I had the chance to do this project again I would probably have spent more time on making the set look a little bit better as I feel it looks a tad tacky. Also I would have liked to have met the band or atleast seen a video or a picture so I knew what we where working with because that way we could have planned our shots with the band in mind instead of just what we thought would look good to the music.

Prelim album cover.

We chose to design the cover in black and white to represent the style of music that the band make, which is in the style of retro. Their style also seems quite 50's or 60's like, and so the black and white photo suits the band for this purpose. Furthermore, in the photo the 3 girls are dressed in a sort of retro/60's style so this just emphasises the image even more. We chose the three girls to be on the front cover because they represent the band more than the boys who are on the instruments as they are the front girls and give off the image. We kept the writing to be simple but effective, and so it is just bold and black. This was so that the band did not seem tacky.

On the back cover, we have the 3 girls in a more natural position and they have not realised a photo has been taken and so are laughing and having fun. This gives off the feeling that their image is not false and stops a fake image being given off. In the photo on the back cover, there is a boy (the drummer) sat next to them to show that there are more band members and that it is not simply a typical girl band as there are boys present in the band too.

Jane Doe- Naughty

Before the summer holidays we did a prelim task to give us a taste of what it would be like to shoot a music video. We where split up into groups of 4 and each given a section of the song. My group had the first 45 seconds but I will upload just our part soon.

A2 - Music Industry: Advanced Production Brief

In this second year of Media Studies, I will create a promotion package for the release of an album of a new artist, including...

a music video to his or hers first single
the cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD package)
a magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD package).

Task 7

Task 7

View more presentations from hurtwoodhousemedia5.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructiong this product ?

How did you attract/ address your audience ?

I believe the main attraction with our film is the fact that is is "Social Realism" meaning that is addresses current affairs that are going on in the world today, unlicensed cabs are a big issue in The United Kingdom today and soemthing needs to be done about it. I think that teenagers seeing our film would perhaps make them think twice about getting into a strangers car in the future. When parents here about this film they will puch their kids to go and see it so that they may think again next time they go to get in an unlicensed taxi in the futrue, so with backing from parents all over the country and maybe even the government because of the topic we are using this is going to help with atracting/ addressing our audience.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?

This is our first shot of our sequence and is there to establish the location that we start in and also to tell the audience that our character is alone making it more believable for her to be kidnapped by our unlicensed taxi driver. This therefore upholds the conventions of film sequence.

Here is a shot of our black cab pulling off as it is taken this is meant to represent that she is being left behind outside the cab and opens up a hole in our story to allow our unlicensed cab to pull into position and begin the real story, this conforms to the conventions of a film sequence as this is where she starts her journey on being alone and this is important to our storyline. 

Here is our unlicensed taxi picking up our teen and even though there are people here that have nothing to do with our story which sort of tells our audience that she is not alone which in other scenes could make our story unbelievable but the fact that she isn't in the cab yet it is ok and doesn't look to bad. This scene I believe again upholds the conventions of a media sequence.

Here is a shot of our drivers eyes in the rear view mirror and working together with the image below we have created a really creepy and weird sequence as he is looking our character up and down as she sleeps this conforms to the conventions of a thriller sequence.

Our second rear view mirror shot here we see our teen in the back of the car sleeping and when this is cross faded with the other mirror shot it really helps to tell us what kind of a man our driver really is and we start to get a sense of what is about to happen. I think this conforms to the conventions of the thriller genre.

Here our character is now awake again and starts to question where she is and this is when the non-diagetic music starts and we know that the scene is about to pic up, this conforms to the conventions of a sequence of its type.

Here is a close up of our teen on the back seat of the unlicensed cab becoming agitated and worried about where she is, this is a prime example of a shot that builds tension in a scene and for that reason I think it conforms to the conventions of a thriller sequence.

Here is where our story really kicks off this is where our driver shows the teen that he has stolen her ID over a week prior to this event, this clearly scares our character and in the next image you see that she is trying to escape from the car, this screen grab definitely conforms to the conventions of a thriller sequence and creates tension and fright.

Here is our character trying to escape from the car this is a screen grab that definitely upholds the conventions of the thriller genre as she is trapped and really wants to get out.

How does your product repsesent particular social groups ?

In our opening sequence there are only two characters present therefore we only have two social groups to look at these are teenage girls and middle aged men. Below are two images one of each of our characters I am going to talk about them and their social groups that they represent.

First we have our teenage girl we tried to portray her in the most stereotypical way possible. We made our character "Lottie Tolhurst" vulnerable and naive and in the opening scene we showed her walking out of a club which is quite typical in the life of many teenagers of today.

We then have our middle aged male taxi driver, this is a tricky one to talk about as I don't believe there is a social group for "Crazed taxi drivers who kidnap teens" so I am going to talk about how we made his character creepy, firstly we have the driver in his car pull straight up after the black cab pulls off which is a bit keen and creepy. Then we have the driver talking to our teenager in a friendly sense like he knows something about her which isn't normal, by now the audience knows there is something not quite rite going on in the car this is then in-forced with the scene with the license that the driver had stolen prior to the girl getting in the taxi happens. Finally we have our drivers speach which is quite stuttered and stammered which just adds more of a sense of "Strange".

Who would be your target audience ?

We have decided that Pulse would be most likely to make our film because it is low budget and British; seeing as there audience already is British teens aged between 16 and 24 with films such as Kidulthood and Shifty I believe that these audiences would be perfect for our film. The fact that our film is social realism really appeals to the British teens as it is stuff a lot of them have to deal with on a day to day basis which means they can relate and I think in a sense this is quite comforting for teens today. 16 to 24 year olds these days will be in Education or maybe in work perhaps they have just come out of university and are in a new job after their studies, they will be facebook users and will watch a lot of movies either ripped off of the internet or in the cinema, for the most part the 16 to 18’s will have disposable money and will use the cinema more than other ages but as they get older they wont go as much until it maybe becomes once a year if your lucky, they are all going to listen to music and this will be another way of bringing in our audience by using new up to date British music in the film. Our 25 to 34 year old audience will probably be more men than women due to the genre of the film it will be violent and will deal with issues in society today and I think a kidnapping taxi driver is going to be a sore spot for women aged between 25 and 34. Our film will most likely attract more males than females because of the plot; a kidnapping taxi driver is not going to be a female’s choice of film when shown among other films about love and romance. Males are our target audience at the end of the day males of any age but we believe that males between 16 and 24 are going to watch this film more than anyone else.

Shoot day two.

We shot the second part of our thriller yesterday which went well, we used the car in this shoot mainly filming interior shots of the car and our two acts Lottie and Simon, the only problem we faced on the day was making the car look like it is moving as we could not shoot it when the car was actually moving, so we ended up using two red head lights and by making sure the windows where wet and the focus was sharp on our character we could move the lights past the window giving a false sense of movement, this worked quite well I think. After we tackled this problem we decided that our script wasn’t right so we had to improvise a new one on the spot which was quite a challenge but in the end we all pulled together and came out on top despite the bitterly could weather and the rain. I was assigned role of director on this shoot my favourite and because the idea for this shoot originally came from something I wanted to shoot a while back we developed on it and came out with “the driver” which I think became a nice idea in the end after the tedious processes we had to go through and the endless planning. My role as director meant that I had to give the acts direction and decide what we needed to shoot to make sure the story came out a good one and I believe that I did this pretty well but this opening sequence will not be what it is without the work put in from all the crew from camera to sound to production.

What institution would make your film ?

I chose Pulse as the institution that would make my film as they specialize in low budget British made films such as Kildulthood directed by Noel Clarke and Shifty directed by Eran Creevy in conjunction with Between the eyes films, two movies made by British directors by a British institution. Kidulthood and Shifty are films I chose that are similar to the one I want to make because they both tackle serious maters that are present in society today with drugs and rebellious teens, unlicensed cabs are a serious problem in the U.K. and I think for that reason Pulse would make our movie. Pulse is a company with only a handful of Directors on board most of which Direct commercials and music videos so they are all first timers when it comes to making a feature film or a movie and I believe that’s why they would make our movie because it is low budget and would give one of their Directors a chance to direct a movie. This film would be released on DVD and in the Cinema around 6 weeks apart, in the same way as “This is England” was which seemed to work for them. Also by making a saving on publicity as we could get backing from the government as this film tackles a serious problem in our country with all of those elements coming together as one the company is going to make a big saving and even bigger profit along with maybe allowing Film4 to invest some money for a premier on their channel on T.v. and the rights to T.V as they can recoup costs for advertising if the film is successful, on top of all that I believe it would be a good idea to sell this movie to an American distribution company as we know this film will not be released in the Cinema in the states but can be sold on DVD out there. Pulse does not specialize in one specific genre of film the problem is that they have not had the chance to shoot a lot of different movies so everything they have done film wise is based around gangs and drugs and I believe this is another reason that they would like to shoot my movie. I believe that Pulse targets a teenage British audience which again is another reason my film would be appealing to Pulse as it will teach teens not to take unlicensed cabs.

Our first shoot day.

The Shoot in Guildford went really well, we did a shot of the club sign tilting down showing Lottie Putting her jacket on coming out of the club and looking for a cab. We did a shot of a cab driving away from her and the unlicensed cab pulling up and her getting in. We then did a shot from another angle when Lottie is walking towards the camera and we see the black cab and unlicensed cab pulling up again. After that we did a shot through the window of the unlicensed cab as Lottie gets in it. These shots went really well for us but it was difficult as there were a lot of people walking past. It was also hard as we didn’t have a lot of time so we were rushed. This was my first time using a camera out in a town filming and there were a few inconveniences that I didn’t really think about before shooting i.e. the sound of the road, the traffic outside the club and getting the taxi to pull up on time. We could have used a better form of communication i.e. walky-talky’s to get everything coming at the correct time and making sure that people were not getting in the way of the camera. We decided to do these shots outside the club first of all to give us an establishing shot and secondly to show that she is alone and vulnerable, when we see the black cab pull of this is to show that she is being left alone in this place where she clearly looks lost. When the white car ‘our unlicensed cab’ pulls up this was shot from in front on a wide to show the confusion of this car pulling up by her and then the happiness when she realises this is a cab. All of our shots outside the car where done to give a sense of being alone and lots and I believe we achieved this.

The Driver- StoryBoard.

Reference

This film starts off with shots like we want in out thriller. The conversation between the girl and our driver is going to be shot very much similar to that in this film "Collateral".

Why Did We Use These Props?

• Abby is really upset having just broken up with her boyfriend, she is standing in the rain waiting for a cab
• Tomasz: you alright love, want a cab?
• Abby : Thanks , How much will it be to get to 54 Cavendish road
• Tomasz: Oh I think about £20 will cover it
• Abby: Ok
• Abby: struggles to pick up her suitcase
• Tomasz: Want a hand?
• Abby: Yeah, thanks
Tomasz goes to put Abby’s suitcase in the boot. Whilst doing so Abby is looking for her phone in her handbag and accidentally drops her bag on the floor-the contents falling out.
• Abby: Shit
• Tomasz: don’t worry ill get that get in the car (Picking up the contents of her bag from the road he hands the bag to her).
• Abby: Okay let me see how much I have got… (Pause)… Oh no I’ve lost my purse fuck sake today is not my day.
• Tomasz: How much you got?
• Abby: I have a tenner in my pocket (She shows him the £10 note)
• Tomasz: (looking through her purse at her ID cards) Don’t worry, you go to Warwick don’t you? You can pay me back there ill give you my card.
• Abby: Oh I didn’t know you went to Warwick? Thanks that’s great
• Tomasz: yeah on my third year now.
• Abby: oh what are you studying?
• Tomasz: Psychology.
• Abby: oh really? I’ve never seen you around.
(all goes silent. After a few seconds another voice is heard through the taxi radio)
• Other Man(Russian): Mate after the job your on I’ve got another one for you
• Tomasz (Russian): I don’t think this one will be going home, she’s a looker.
• Abby: Excuse me, sorry, my flats that way. (points right)
• Tomasz: nahhhh I know a better route.
(she falls asleep on the back seat)
• Tomasz (Russian): I’m Almost here get ready.
• Other Man (Russian): Ok great see you soon.
(BLACK OUT)
(Sounds of doors Slamming and a loud scream from the men who are shouting in Russian. )