Practising Split Screen

Today I have been practicing editing for the split screen parts of our music video. It is quite difficult to judge the amounts that I should clip out of each shot but I am going to spend the rest of this lesson practicing. Here is another example of a already existing music video that has inspired me to include split screen in our video.

Further Editing

Due to a drama exam taking place throughout this week, Kim and I have been finding it very difficult to get in enough time to edit and also to film the remaining footage we need to complete our music video.
We are planning to do this next week when our exam will be finished.

Continuing Editing

In order to get the editing finished as quickly as possible, I have been doing as much of it as possible in my free periods. Although it takes a while to clip all of the shots so that they are in time with the words, I am enjoying doing it.





Here you can see that I have been editing all of the footage of Rob.

I think we are going to have to plan another filming session in which we will get some shots of more people, because we have already used a lot of the footage we took last week and there is still 1 minute and 50 seconds to go of the song.

This is a screenshot of our timeline in Premiere Elements. As you can see we still have a lot of footage to add before the song will be completed.

Editing

Now that we have sorted out the song, Lisa and I have began editing the footage. We have to arrange it all so that it fits in time with the music. We have decided that since we already have lots of dancing shots that we no longer need to include the dancing shots in which Lisa and I are painted black and white, as they would just be a repeat of the dancing shots we already have.

Groove Armada Digipack

Studying Digipacks, I have been looking at one album called Black Light by Groove Armada.
In an attempt to make myself more familiar with the process of creating my own digipack and also to help inspire ideas for my one, I made a replica of this album.

I did as much as possible to make my version look as close to the real thing as possible.

Todays Lesson

Today in the lesson, Kim and I both had a turn at editing our song in appropriate places as the original song is 4 minutes and 30 seconds, which is definitely too long for us to create our music video to.

We have cut the song down successfully in order to proceed with our editing, to put our clips with our music accordingly.

                                  

Finally Filming

Last night Lisa and I re-started filming. We had a number of our actors with us so we got quite a lot done, and there was a chilled and relaxed atmosphere which made it a really fun and enjoyable hour. All of the actors were also extremely co-operative and weren't shy about doing anything we asked them to do; as a result the time passed extremely quickly.

This time I ensured that the black background and floor covers were much bigger than last time, and also that they were taught so you couldn't see any creases in the material. As well as that, we used the floor lights again but so that they were much brighter this time. Here are a couple of clips of footage we took.

What I Did Wrong

Here is a video of some of the footage I shot last week and a description of what is wrong and why



Forward Planning

Due to medical issues, and problems with finding appropriate times to film in our chosen space, our filming process is taking longer than expected.
I have emailed our entire cast to come up this evening so we can get together as much footage as possible, and then we will take people individually for re-shooting if needed.

Started Filming

Last night I filmed parts of our film; mainly four of the five stereotypical characters parts. I have uploaded it onto the computer and after re-watching all of the footage I had realised that the lighting was far too dark, and also the backdrop was too small and it looks unprofessional.
Also, the camera I was using took a long time to focus, and since the lighting wasn't very good it took even longer than usual to focus on whoever was in the shot. I'm therefore going to use a different camera with a better focus next time I'm filming.
The sheets I put up to use as the backgrounds weren't big enough and it looks unprofessional in the footage so next time I will make sure that they are bigger so you can't see anything around the edges of them.
Although I doubt we will use any of the footage I took, it was a beneficial learning curve as I have learnt that when filming indoors there needs to be much more lighting than what would be used then when filming elsewhere.
I am going to talk to Lisa to see what we can do and see what changes we can make it make it look better from an audience perspective.

Filming Times

Lisa and I have found it difficult to find times that we are both free in order for us to film due to our hectic school schedule.

So far we have not managed to keep with any of the times we planned before half term so we need to start filming as soon as possible.

All of our raw footage needs to of been filmed by the 20th of November which is only 10 days from now. so we really need to get cracking.



During class today we need to sit down and decide some deffinate times that we are going to dedicate to filming.



Song Purachse

The first compact disk (CD) came out in the mid 1980s but sales didn't start to pick up until the early 1990s.

A typical CD came with a cover, CD and little booklet about the artist

In 2001 iTunes was released and as a result internet sales started increasing and CD purchase decreased.

In 2010, Cd's have been largely replaced by other forms of digital storage such as flash drives and as a result audio CD sales have dropped by nearly 50% from their peak in 2000. As well as iTunes, to date there are so many different websites on the internet that enable anyone to buy a song or an album and download it straight onto a computer instead of having to do so from a CD.

The online iTunes website is one of the many ways people nowadays download music

With the invention of online purchase comes the possibility of piracy, but since nowadays its possible to access in order to buy any artist music online it is a necessity for them to have their work easily available.



Star Images

Star images are used for helping to promote an album, CD or digipack. It helps the cover look much more aesthetically pleasing, and also shows you who the artist is.

The star image is sometimes used as the front cover of the digipack, but if this is done, it must be the best picture out of the whole reel of shots taken.
The photograph must also link in somehow with either the album name or the song name.

FOR EXAMPLE:

Mika's album is called - Life in Cartoon Motion.
If you look at the cover of the album, the artwork has all been done in a cartoon style and the colours and style definately all link in together. There is also a smaller picture of the artist on the cover too.

Rihanna's album is called 'Rated R' which actually already links in with her name as they both begin with the same letter. The album is a darker style of music in comparison to her previous albums, so in order to shed light on this, the cover photograph and the complete digipack style has been altered to fit this new style of the artist.

In conclusion, I think that our photographs must link in with our music video, which I think will eventually include a collage almost of photographs of all of the people in our music video, but also use a photograph of the original artist, The Black Eyed Peas, in order to credit them for the song, due to copyrights. 

Stop Motion Final

Today Lisa and I have taken the pictures for the stop motion that will appear in our music video. In order to stop any of the pictures from going squint we taped down the paper to the floor. In the next couple of days we are going to start filming our footage.

Further Digipack Research

Looking further into the non-artist matter, here are a couple of music videos I found which are relevant to ours, which do not actually use the artist in the videos, and instead use actors or other random people.
This is the reason that our artist will not have a big effect on our Digipack, but credits will be given.

DigiPack Research

I have been researching different Digipacks today, trying to find different examples and also to use these as inspiration for our own Digipack for our music video.
As most of the Digipacks I found were actually for albums, we have decided to create ours in a different style. As we obviously do not have the artist present in our video, and we have many ideas of our own for the Digipack, we will pretend we are making it as the producers, but remember to add credits to the artist and possibly add a little leaflet inside our pack.
This will give us more freedom to create the Digipack in a more personal way and also so we can put our distribution company on it.

Here are the Digipacks I have found today, and liked.

 

I like this first one as the pictures are interesting and colourful. It is the correct size that ours will be and there is no writing which makes it more aesthetically pleasing.

 

This is a 8 panelled case, and is also very colourful. I really like the style and simplicity, but I want to use a bit more detail on our Digipack.

This one is very interesting as the pack's background pictures fit in with the actual design on the discs. It looks like speakers when sitting like this and it is very aesthetically pleasing.

Practice Fonts

For our coursework DigiPack, Kim and I decided to keep our original font which we used in our title on our Blog page. We think it looks nice against our title and suits it well.

Here is our first try at the front cover.