Practising on Final Cut

We played about with editing software Final Cut to work out how to do the overlay shots we plan to include.

This first shot is really effective; the colours from the Hackney railway bridge lights and the graffiti from Leake St tunnel contrast really well.

This shot does not work as well. There is too much going on in one shot; the trees from Richmond Park, and the graffiti in the tunnel, plus the camera movement.

The overlay below is an idea to express our actor Will reflecting; he appears in more than one place at once to portray time passing.

Our Animatic

This shows our basic plan for our music video, and will help us know exactly what we're filming. The shots are scans of our story board edited together on Final Cut Express.

These are scans from our storyboard. They aren't in any particular order, but I have explained briefly the ideas for each shot, to add some clarity to our Animatic.

Photographs from filming

We had our first filming session on Sunday 24th of January, around Waterloo, Richmond Park and Hackney. Original plans were to also film in Greenwich and Vauxhall but time restrictions meant we didn't film in these areas and will probably just cut these ideas from our video.

I took some photographs throughout the day to document our filming.

Leake Street tunnel in Waterloo, London's designated graffiti area...

The lighting in the tunnel was perfect, and the colours of the graffiti came out beautifully. We utilised my fisheye conversion lens in our video and I think the results are really striking and unique. 'The first types of fisheye lenses to be developed were "circular fisheyes" — lenses which took in a 180° hemisphere and projected this as a circle within the film frame.' We love the distortion and effect the fisheye creates; we can capture more of the tunnel and create a more visually interesting shot.

- Waterloo, Leake St -

- Hackney Rd -

- Leake St Stairwell -

We attempted filming some deer in Richmond Park, however, it was impossible to get close enough to any; we ended up chasing them, meaning any footage we got was wobbly and completely unusable. When we finally had a perfect shot the camera stopped working, so we missed out. We continued to use Grace's digital camera to film, and in the end we felt that using this camera was better, as the colours and quality of footage were superb. We decided to cut the deer footage from our video, as the footage just isn't of good enough quality. We will probably also cut the flock of birds as well, because we have not yet seen any.

Making the Animatic

According to Wikipedia, an animatic is: 'In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called "animatics" to give a better idea of how the scene will look and feel with motion and timing. At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence. More commonly, a rough dialogue and/or rough sound track is added to the sequence of still images (usually taken from a storyboard) to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together.'

Making an animatic helps us make a coherent plan for filming and can inspire further ideas for footage. It also illustrates our ideas to an outsider to our group in a visual way. We drew our storyboard in black marker and scanned the pages onto a computer, saved them as photos and then dropped them into Final Cut to edit them with the song.

We also added transitions such as 'cross dissolve' to imitate effects we plan to use in the video.

Cast

William Martin - Main Actor

Age: 18

Costume: White t-shirt, Black jeans, Grey hoodie, Boots, Dark coat

Paige Lidbury - Actress

Age: 18

Costume: Black dress, Heels, White fur coat

Tom Martin - Actor

Age: 18

Costume: Jeans, Hoodie, Shirt, Jacket

Shooting Schedule

We are mostly filming in London, and have decided to go there on Sunday 24th to film everything. We are hoping to film everything in one day, and are traveling up early to spend the entire day there. We need to plan the order we film as the lighting conditions change throughout the day, and we require different conditions for different parts of the video to create varied atmospheres.

We plan to start in Greenwich to film the alleyways in the industrial area near to The 02 Arena, as we wanted daylight for these shots. Then we will travel to Leake Street tunnel in Waterloo, as this is the next closest location - lighting conditions are unimportant as it will be dark enough in the tunnel. We're then heading to Vauxhall to film some shots including Battersea Power Station, then on to Richmond Park to film the deer and bird shots. We will then head to Hackney Road in east London to film the bulk of the footage as the sun begins to set to get a dusk atmosphere.

The industrial area in Greenwich, near to the O2 arena. The rough and abandoned look to the area is perfect for the theme of our video.

Target Audience

Chase & Status, the DJs whose track we have chosen for our video, are from London and produce drum and bass, dubstep, grime and electronic music. This music scene is typically popular in urban environments, and fans of alternative music such as rock and punk are often also into drum and bass due to its extreme and controversial nature. We want to capture the energy Chase & Status create when performing live and make our video demand the audiences attention.

Plan B is also an urban artist who produces rap/hip hop music, but often features an acoustic guitar, attracting fans of rock and indie music. Plan B is influenced heavily by where he grew up - Forest Gate in east London. He has been surrounded by drugs, sex and violence and these themes come through in his honest and controversial lyrics. Similarly, we want to create a controversial video, as we want to shock and engage the audiences attention, and show them something different.

Our target audience is therefore going to be teen and young adult fans of urban, dance and rock music, who would be drawn to something unconventional and controversial. Our chosen track, and music similar to it, is often played in clubs and so our target audience will be quite young, perhaps 17-25. Female members of our target audience may be attracted to the artist, or our actor in the music video, which helps create an attachment to the artist and their music, and boost sales. Our target audience read publications such as music magazines, e-zines and newspapers, and so we need to look at these to find the conventions of music magazines.

Creating A Brand

For our 3 tasks we have to create a recognisable brand for the artist, to attract the target audience, and therefore help promote their music. This means there must be a coherent house style throughout the Music Video, Digipak Artwork, and Digipak Advertisement, through elements such as colour scheme, lighting, genre, clothing and font.

The featuring artist on our chosen track 'End Credits' is East London singer/rapper Plan B. His forthcoming album 'The Defamation of Strickland Banks' is currently receiving wide promotion, with posters, live television performances, and magazine articles helping create a buzz around him. One of the main promotional tools are music videos. Plan B's video for 'Stay Too Long' is currently being aired on music channels, while the single is receiving ample air time on radio stations.

His website features photographs and design features and his 'image' or style which can be seen throughout all the promotional tools. Below are some promotional photographs; they are all grainy, black and white film photographs, and suggest and old, soul singer appearance.

EDIT: 26th January - Plan B on NME site

The NME is a magazine which is likely to be read by our target audience, and so by publishing Plan B on their website, NME are publicising the artist further. The photograph included illustrates Plan B's new soul singer 'look' or image, which helps to promote the 'brand' of Plan B.

Plan B is also featured in this weeks NME magazine, and so I photographed a page from the interview to show the 'image' that is being promoted for Plan B.

Digipak Artwork

I started looking at existing artwork that my group could use as inspiration and influence for our own digipak design.

Escape The Fate's album 'Dying is Your Latest Fashion' has simple yet really effective cover art. A really high quality photograph of our video's actor could provide a striking digipak cover. The Bronx also feature the bottom half of a face on their album artwork, but with some graphics depicting the band name and album title 'The Bronx'. We could employ the use of graphics in our own cover art as we are all capable in Adobe Photoshop.

Faithless' album 'Sunday 8pm' is also a photograph. A location shot from our video, such as Leake Street graffiti tunnel could be used as digipak artwork. This artwork is also clever as it features the album title 'Sunday 8pm' within the photograph, which may not be noticable at first glance. The Used's latest album 'Artwork' features a somewhat controversial cover image. I like the darkness and grittyness of the photo, and how it is not afraid to shock. Although we don't feature drugs in our video, something equally controversial could provide a unqiue cover shot.

Something simple like From First To Last's album 'Heroine' could work, but as we are a creative group I think we'd like to include more than just text in our design.

----------------

Brainstorming with my group, we found this artwork:Deftones' Album 'Saturday Night Wrist' features interesting artwork. We really liked the use of overlaying images and colours. It creates a disorientating and chaotic design. There are also sexual connotations in the photo of the woman, and this could provide some controversy.

Plan B, one of the artists featuring on our chosen track, has also realeased his own albums. The first, 'Who Needs Actions When You Got Words' features a room on the cover, and the artist, Ben Drew. The brick walls connote a grimey and urban environment, something which reflects the artists style and music. The blood on the hand on the front of his second release 'Paint It Blacker' connotes violence. These themes could influence our own cover art, providing a unique and attention-grabbing design for our digipak.

The artwork on the left is for a band called The Blackout, for their debut EP 'The Blackout! The Blackout! The Blackout!'. The dark lighting, colour scheme and cityscape are things we liked about this cover. The image on the right is of Aiden's latest album 'Knives'. We really liked the emotion conveyed through the dark, grainy photograph and the angle at which it is taken. Anger is an emotion present in our video, as well as regret, sadness, frustration and despair; any of these emotions could be portrayed effectively through a photograph.These album covers by Scary Kids Scaring Kids are influential to us, firstly because of the blood and pain shown on the left image, something we plan to feature in our video, and secondly because of the cityscape in the right image. Our video will be shot in London, avoiding cliched shots of landmarks such as Big Ben, but will probably feature a cityscape view from somewhere such as Parliament Hill in Hampstead which would provide a lesser known view of the City.Pink Floyd's album 'Animals' features a high contrast shot of Battersea Power Station in Southwest London. We want to use this a location when shooting our video. However, using it as album artwork may look too similar. Furthermore, I think a more stylistic and unique photograph would be more suited to the digipak cover; something which conveys my groups creative potential. Jamie T's album Panic Prevention features a very untidy room on the cover, which links to the bedroom we have in mind for our video. The mess connotes our actors distorted and frustrated state of mind.

Bloc Party's albums always feature interesting artwork. The left image from the album 'Intimacy' links to the initmate shots we have planned for our video, and also provides sexual connotations for a controversial edge. The artwork for 'A Weekend in the City' also links to our cityscape ideas. Also, we plan to shoot parts of the video at night, so a photograph shot at night, possibly featuring city or car lights could link perfectly with our video.

I have noticed that all the fonts featured on these album covers are simple and subtle. In some cases, such on as Bloc Party's albums, the sam font is used, to help promote them as a recognisable brand. The use of simple fonts means the artist name and album name is easily read and remembered.

Digipak Research

For one of our ancillary tasks we have to design the artwork for a CD/DVD Digipak release, and a magazine advertisement for said Digipak.

What is a Digipak? (from MediaHeaven.co.uk)

'The Digipak is the exceptional alternative to standard jewel box packaging. Made mostly from thick card, the digipak is virtually shatterproof and allows great graphic display. Originally used for the album packaging of leading musicians, the digipak and digipak family are now priced reasonably enough to be used for any CD or DVD project. The digipak is an extremely versatile packaging. It can be made to accommodate a booklet either by placing in a die-cut slot or gluing onto one of the panels. In addition, tThe panels can be increased from 4 to 6, 8 or more. The DVD Digipak is a popular alternative to the DVD box. It is now widely used for feature film DVD releases which are special editions because it increases the value and creates a premium product.'

We could either produce a 3 panelled Digipak, and cd artwork, meaning we'd have to create a design across 6 sides, or a 2 panelled Digipak, for 4 sides. Both obviously include the artwork for the discs.