Friday 6 December 2013

The promo!

Scar - As Long As You Know (A2 Media Production)



We posted our music video on both YouTube and Facebook to get as big a response as possible and get some feedback. Overall we got some good responses, with a few positive comments and over 60 likes in less than 24 hours.













Magazine Advert - Ancillary task


("NME" and "Q" non official ratings, added for effect can be removed if need be)

This is a print screen of all the additions and effects that have been made to the picture, seen as "mag ad", all effects listed above this with the exception to "SCAR" text and "New Debut Album Fence.." text are changes that have been made to the original picture (see Location for the original picture). There is also another layer that has the solid colour of black over it, this makes up the black background. In terms of convention it sticks to the most typical/standard format or layout there is, this being band name at the top, relevant picture in the middle and additional information underneath including album name and a featured song. As it says above i have added some fake ratings, these are unofficial obviously and if need be i could remove them, however i believe it adds to the design and makes it look more professional. Using Photoshop i have created a semi-posterized picture for the main feature of the poster, playing around with the exposure, hue/saturation, colour balance, brightness/contrast and the actual posterize tools this is what the final outcome was. The picture is very relevant to our promo video we have produced for the song "As long as you know", the effects that have been put on the picture are inspired by other posters/album art such as one of Sum 41's, see Conventions of ancillary tasks - Album art and Conventions of ancillary tasks - Posters/adverts. Many, if not all, of the other posters i have researched feature the black and white effect, this is a feature of this advert we have produced however to differ and stand out from the others ours includes a hint of blue, which is a reoccurring theme of both the picture that has then been carried through to the text.

Further changes could and may be made to this poster, for example the font of the text "SCAR" may be changed to be more distinctive.

Monday 2 December 2013

Revised digipak design

We decided to reconsider our digipak design, however we stayed with the same themes and concepts that we looked at previously. In our previous design we had a photo of the actual band SCAR however our music video didn't feature the actual members but did feature us acting as the band members. We finally decided that to stay consistent throughout the task, it would make more sense to have the same people we used as the band members in the video as the members shown on the digipak. To do this on our first day of filming we decided to take some photographs of our band members in formation, in the "band shots" location (Tolethorpe hall - outdoor stage- see Location), this specific photo was taken from above from a set of stairs looking down at a very serious looking bunch of band members, all of which are in their stereotypical costumes. To fit into our themed digipak we took this to Adobe Photoshop on a computer and began to edit it, to fit in with the rest of our digipak we put a sepia filter on it and then played with the colour, contrast and white balance to get it how it looks here (bottom right tile), we also added some overlays that have similar themes to the rock genre, especially reminiscent of tattoos that can often be associated with rock artists.

The inside right (Edwina Mears) and the inside left (Luke Doyle) are pictures we took when filming our "black room" footage of each individual character within our music video. these specific characters were the most important characters of the narrative we filmed for the specific song "As long as you know". Luke in this was our lead band member and vocalist, but was also the character within our video that was having this serious relationship with the female character played by Edwina. This lead us to further include the female character on the inside right. Again both of these images have had the sepia effect added to fit in with the sepia theme we have with our digipak, they have also been cropped to the correct size and we played around with the saturation, hue and white balance.

The last two pictures included, extra panel and back cover images are both images taken on the first day of filming of the location we filmed the band shots in. As we thought our location was so fitting to our chosen genre we believed it couldn't go a miss on the ancillary tasks. The image on the extra panel is a long shot of the outdoor stage with the drum kit set up and sat by itself on the stage. This particular still image we thought was again very fitting to the genre and is extremely similar to the final shot of our music video therefore creating links. Again the back cover was another image taken of the outdoor stage but form further up showing the stage form an extreme long shot and the empty audience chairs either side. Yet again this suits the genre well giving an urban moody feel that the rock genre is so often related to, the lighting in this photo is particularly a favourite aspect of mine that works well with the sepia. Effects that have been added are yet again the sepia to continue the theme and we played with the white balance, hue and saturation.





Setting up the black room

The black room was an idea that allowed us to single out characters within our music video. This gave us the opportunity to show the emotions of each character well for example regret that the lead band member had and the laughing of the female character. This also allowed us to have more angles and shots to use without the complications of lots of mise en scene issues, angles such as low angles and better more defined close ups that where specific to the characters (instead of having lighting issues and other band members involved). Talking of lighting it also gave us a lot of room to add in some really subtle yet effective use of lighting, instead of the natural lighting we used in previous shots, it also allowed us to make use of the lighting equipment we hired out one of which was a good profile light. 

This picture below was a quick snap of the building of the black room. We used a small office room in which we shut the curtains, boarded the windows and put up black foam sheets to make it look like a black background. Furthermore we turned of the lights and set up a lighting rig (a make shift d.i.y job) using a beam of wood and other assorted items, which worked quite effectively.




















A nice diagram, drawn by Ben, sums up the set up we had nicely (a side on view). It shows the lighting position and the position of any character being filmed. It was a makeshift set up but allowed us to film what we wanted very nicely and the footage was good quality. See Revised digipak design and look at the top left and top right tile to get an idea of the final image that it allowed us to get, or watch the video which will be in a later post.


Changes in the plan

Casting for our music video was an issue, due to problems with not being able to find a college that was able to take time off school and fit the criteria that we wanted. This called for a changed version of what we originally planned, however there isn't a huge difference. The character we had problems casting for was the thug that we originally planned to have as the drummer, to deal with this we decided to change Ben's role as the camp guy to the thug drummer. Although this is a change from the plan it does allow us to have an actual drummer on the drums and therefore making it easier to get good quality band shots of the drummer. However this did face us with the problem of then filling the gap of the camp guy. To do this we decided to use another (the final member of our media production group) within the video, which is Becky. Instead of having a camp guy on the guitar we decided to just have a female guitarist, which again means we have to change the plans further and get rid of all of our camp guy scenes/jokes we had. Looking over the storyboard and thinking about how we could implement Becky, our female guitarist, into this video we decided we could play with the idea of a fantasy that the other band members (thug drummer and nerd bassist) look forward to seeing, however when it gets to this we see the female guitarist shake her head (effectively saying no).



Revised storyboard shots 70-75: