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)