Evaluation Question 4: How did you use Media Technologies in constructions and research, planning & evaluation stages?

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is combination of your main product & ancillary texts?

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge form & conventions of real media products?

Construction: Orson No Tomorrow - Final Cut

Music Video Final Cut

Construction: Digipak - Magazine Cover

Orson Magazine Cover

Construction: Digipak - Album Artwork

Digipak

Album Artwork

Front Cover (By Myself)

CD Pane - (By Jess)

Inside Pane - (By Kyle)

Back Pane (By Danny)

Letter of Permission

Digipak - Producing Album Front Cover

Album Front Cover

To create the album front cover I used Adobe Photoshop which is a great creative photo editing tool for producing the Digipak.

I firstly began by changing the colours of the background, to do this selected the gradient tool making the colour orange and yellow. The colour of the background is suppose to be similar to the lead singers guitar. To add the red tint around the edges I used the gradient tool again however on a different layer and changed the opacity of it.

Once I was finished with adjust the colours of the background I then imported the images of the band members from the photo shoot we did. I resized the image and used the magic wand tool and highlighted the areas which I didn't want to appear.

I then made another layer below with a bold colour so that I could tidy up the areas around the lead singer.

To create the silhouette effect I went to the blending options and filled in the inner shadow of the band member. The edges around the image were a bit messy, to solve this problem I went to the image options and then choose refine to sharpen the edges. 

Once I was finished making silhouettes for all 4 band members I resized the images and placed them on the bottom section of the front cover. I then moved onto adding the artist and album name. The font for Orson was PTsans and 'Bright Idea' is Trajan Pro. To add more effects tot he text I again used the blending options and added some glow and shine to the text.

Final Product

Orson: No Tomorrow - Rough Cut

Music Video - Rough Cut

Here is the rough cut of the music video that our group compose, as you can see it is still far from completion as we are missing some scenes from the narrative.

I think the progression of the music video is going well, although there are some parts missing which we have not managed to film yet, this was due to the poor weather conditions for the days we organised filming.

As for the editing of the band performance scenes they are edited well, in terms of the variety of shots ranging from long, medium, close, and angled shots of the band. However the construction of the performance are mostly base layers so that we can add more clips and the final version of the music video will have more cuts in between that will match the beat of the music. Also we tried not to include too many shots in a section as we may have to use them to cut in on the narrative parts which we cannot currently edit, although we had a good amount of footage. I thought that we should have the base of the clips which match the music and then wait until we have the narratives in place so that in case we use too many clips on one section and not have enough, and although we can use same clips for different parts it would affect the continuity.

For the use of camera I can't expand on the narrative too much since there is less of it but the concept is the point of view of the band member who is late for practise. This idea was thought upon because it would be unique to see for the perspective of an individual and the effect would be suitable for the song we are doing.

The performance footage is reasonable in my opinion, even though we have lots of footage we also do not have enough of specific parts. They are enough shots of the band together although we don't quite have as many shots of the drummer (shots with is face), and therefore balancing when shots of the guitarist and vocals come in could become challenging. This can also lead to another improvement as in some scenes of the singer drags on too long in comparison to the pace of the jump cuts of the guitar and drummer. The singer lip synced most of the parts of the lyrics well, this made matching the video and audio easy, and as for the lighting we need to balance the clips as some of it is slightly inconsistent and we will need to tweak the colours and brightness of the clips.

Lighting example 1

Lighting example 2

(Lighting 2 is slightly brighter than 1)

In conclusion to where we currently are I think we need to speed up our work pace and try to get the narrative scenes as soon as possible. There are still some parts we need to change and improve and the music video is still far from complete, overall I feel that the quality of the current clips are good and the final product will be appealing to the audience.

Rough Cut Feedback

Here is a photo of the feedback we received from an audience who watched our rough cut of our music video.

A majority of the comments are  positive, an example of one is that they thought we had good lighting which I would agree on for the performance parts as the quality of the scenes are very clear. It also seems that we had a variety of good shots along with close ups of the instruments, although I personally feel that we should have filmed a little more as the rough cut was unfinished, in terms of there were many parts of the narrative missing which still needs shots of the performance to cut into.

Other feedback helped by showing that what we have edited so far is good, however there wasn't any points  or suggestions for improvement besides the fact that parts are missing. Having only positive feedback can sometimes be good as it shows that the progress of the project is going well, but it can also be negative as such because there is nothing to improve upon although I mentioned some improvements earlier we could do.

Magazine Cover Research

For the magazine I researched different posters and found that generally the album front cover is on the magazine cover for the artist, in this case I have looked at Green Day again as they are a Rock genre based band. 

Album Front Cover

Magazine/Poster

As you can see the album artwork is on the poster with also the release dates of the album along with the music label at the bottom left. The reason they are the same is because the objective of the magazine cover is to help promote the band to the audience by displaying the album front cover in order to boost the awareness of the product and as well as showing brand identity. Another example of a similar magazine and album front cover is by Muse, the theme of both the album cover and magazine are pretty much kept in the same style both have a black background and the font is the same, which is done in order to advertise the band well.

Album Front Cover

Magazine/Poster

Filming Day 2 - January 17th

Filming Day 2 - Narrative - Thief Scene

Today Me, Danny and Kyle went to film the thief scene and unfortunately Jess was absent, however we managed to get some footage to allow us to further edit our music video.

This was quite a short scene but was requried to be filmed in one single take, although the performance will be cutting in and out. We started by planning out the stages and explaining the process to Pete who was playing the character of the thief in our music video. In the end we didn't manage to contact Dan who was going to be the angry man so instead we had Danny play him and I was the one with the Go Pro camera.

As for props we needed to cut holes into the hat to match where the thief's eyes were so that when he put them on the audience can still see his eyes. We also used a box that would be what the thief would be struggling to out in the boot of his car.

We did a few test runs to makes sure that everyone knew what was going on and when to come into the scene, I mentioned that we should do at least three takes as we couldn't see what we recorded and having more film isn't a bad thing. This is because there are usually mistakes when recording and we could then judge and choose the best take.

Once we filmed the scene three times we checked on Pete's laptop to ensure that everything we filmed was saved onto the Go Pro and to check if we need to film specific parts again. We watched the clips and found that everything was in place, although after checking on the Mac I felt that if we have the time once we've filmed al the narratives we could possibly refilm one part again. Overall today was another good day.

Dairy Entry - January 12th/14th

12th January - Filming Canceled

The original plan today was to film the Thief scene for the narrative part of our music video, unfortunately the weather was bad as it was raining and would have been difficult to film the scene. We were thinking that we could film on Sunday but our actors and one of our members were busy and wouldn't be able to be there, so we decided to plan for another day to film this scene, currently we have no idea, but we will have a discussion in our session.

- - - - Update 14th January - - - -

The rescheduled time to film was planned to be on monday, however yet again it rained heavily which caused us to cancel shooting on that day. I think that we really need to get some filming done as soon as possible as time is getting short and we still need the narrative scenes for our music video.

After some more planning and seeing what days people were available we made it so that we will definitely film on thursday no matter what the conditions were, such as the weather and if  members are unable to attend. This is to ensure that we will have at least obtained some footage that we can use and immediately start editing the video more.

Digipak - Album Designs

Album Artwork - Designs

The image above is our Album Artwork designs which were drawn by myself. 

Front Cover

On the top left corner is the album front cover which will have the faces of the band members across the pane, however they will be silhouettes of them. The idea came from the iTunes silhouettes, we thought that the effect of this would be unique but similar to other album covers around this area which are more graphical. The font will be similar to the one that I've drawn and will be used on the other panes and including the magazine cover.

iTunes Man

Inside Pane

The inside pane is the design on the bottom left corner, this pane was initially suppose to be the back pane as seen by the barcode drawn in it. We decided that it should be the inside pane because of the patterns and that it would be more suitable since it combined well more with the CD Pane. In the centre of the patterns is a tag which would have the Artist's name and the album name.

CD Pane

The CD Pane is on the bottom right section and is quite simple in its design, the Artist's name and Album name will be on it and underneath will be a graphical image of a light bulb which references the Album name (Bright Idea). The reason for this design is that usually CD covers will have text on it and simple colours, although some may have an image on it such as of the band which we didn't do because we want to keep the style consistent.

Back Pane

The Back Pane is the drawing of the amp on the top right section, we changed this to be at the back pane because the song list will be suitable and clear to read on the side of the image. The image should be darkened slightly around and the amp should be bright to enhance the focus of the image, which also seems as if their is a spotlight on it. I chose the amp because I felt it would go well the representation of the band as Orson is around the rock genre area.

Editing Music Video

Post Production: Editing

Here are some screenshots showing some progression of the music video in final cut pro being edited by us.


Opening/Intro Scene

Shot of Guitar Amp.

For the opening sequence of the music video we decide to make it dietetic, as this would emphasise more that the band are preparing to rehearse/perform and then the music video starts. We felt this would give the music video a more unique style are rather than the song immediately jumping in.



Jump Cuts & Edits

Shot of drum slowly panning up.

We first layered some of the base clips down first and then slowly worked our way to refining the scenes more, for example we wanted the instruments to match the pace of the music and therefore in this section we made a shot of the drum jump cut to the drummer. This would create a more band performance effect since the pace of the music videos are usually quick and jump to multiple shots.

Jumps to the drummer.

Syncing Performance to Music
Most important of all we needed to make sure that the instruments matched the music whilst we were editing, therefore we had to listen to specific parts such as the lead guitar and drum beats. The shots also needed to look realistic enough as it would look out of place and could ruin the overall pace of the music video. An example shown below is of the drummer swinging to hit the snare but then the shot jumps to another shot which is close-up showing the impact of it.

Drummer about to hit Snare.

Hits the Snare.

Also there were times where we didn't have the narrative scenes filmed so we have to mark a section for where the narrative clips were going to be placed, this was done so that we could continue editing other parts without worry too much about not have specific footage yet.

Narrative Scene Space.

To maximise working efficiency we organised the best clips that were going to be used for the music video, we did this by browsing through our footage and then adding them to the favourite section. This allows us to navigate and edit the music with ease as it saved us time with searching for clips since there were a large amount.

Favourites Highlighted.

Lip Syncing & Narrative

One of the things we spent most time editing on was making sure the lip syncing of the video was correct. Lip syncing in the music video is essential in a music video and must be done well otherwise it can affect the quality of the music video. We had to assess what parts should the vocalist appear in for what lyrics, we decided on that most of the chorus parts will have the singer in it and was clear to us as the chorus is repetitive, also you commonly see the appearances of the artist there.

Thief Narrative.

When we placed the narrative scenes into Final Cut we made the scene cut in and out with some shots of the band performing, this was sometimes difficult as we had to find the most appropriate part to fit in. We did this to maintain a consistent pace throughout the video as if we ere to leave the narrative section unedited the scene would pre-long and could keep the audience less engaged and interested.