Digipak

Here is the final Digipak.

It is show in different layouts firstly laid out flat and then shown looking like a real digipak.

Magazine Advert

After much changing and rendering from feedback we obtained this is the final magazine advert.

Digipak

After changing our idea of the motorway, we have now decided on something different. The idea is far simpler and it is so just get photos of the instruments used in the video and shots of the band from the video. We have taken many photos of the guitars from different angles and styles to use for the album and advert.

Here are some examples of digipaks of my own which are similar to what we would like to create.

Here are some of the photos which Tom took of the guitar.

and here is an example of what could be used for the picture of the band.

Final Cut

Below is the final cut video it is the absolute complete version.

Final Cut from Jake Clements on Vimeo.

Further Editing

Coming to the end of editing the video where i have used our audience feedback to make it better, so now the entire video will look good with far less mistakes. Throughout the second part of the editing i have been asking people to watch through what i have done and give feedback on the small part so i could then re enter that part to save completing the video and going back over the whole thing. Once i completed the entire video from start to finish there was then the chance to edit the actual look of the film by adjusting things such like the contrast, saturation and brightness. For a while I 'played around' to see what looks good and what looks not so good. In the end I settled on something here is the setting that I set the filter at.

And here is the look of the video before and after the filter was adjusted.

There is not a huge difference between both the shots but it does make a difference to the whole video.

Continuing Editing

After completing a rough cut I used the audience feedback that we attained to further improve the video that we have already there were some comments made frequently like 'that shot is too long', 'there are too many shots at that angle' and 'more energy is needed here'. So i took these comments and many others into account and set at fixing the problems, after doing so the video should look far better and people will enjoy the video far more.

Upon editing this second time i began to use a second line for footage to sit on this made the editing much easier and far less fiddly.

Evaluation Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout the media coursework we have come across many new technologies that we have had to use to produce our work. The first and probably the most unfamiliar technology is this website www.blogger.com it is where we have had to record all work we have done by posting it onto our own personal blog.

To begin with this site was very complicated and it was rather difficult to get to grips with having to post work as it was being done. As I have never come across blogs before I had no clue how it works or how to use it and for the first couple of weeks using it was very confusing but eventually I managed to understand it fully without and problems.It is quite simple really its just a matter of typing information needed and clicking the 'post' button.

Now that all work has to be done online it is much simpler as everything is in one place, you do not need to move from place to place to find work and it cant be lost. Another good reason for always having to work on the internet constantly is that all research can easily be performed at the the same time in a different tab on the internet.

The internet is an extremely useful source for all the work and research. There are many sites which I used for research and help to complete the coursework some include:

• www.youtube.com
• www.mediasupport.org.uk
• www.kerrang.com
• www.metrolyrics.com
• www.google.com

Things that I used for research I often posted on my blog such as videos and pictures this is done using a separate tab on the blog when writing a post these pictures show this.

To upload a video to a video to my blog you must edit the html and copy and paste a embed code from a video into it and it will then be shown on the blog.

The second most unfamiliar technology is Final Cut Express I have never come across this before either, however I knew that I would become familiar with this in the A2 course so I knew about the program and what it does.

No-one in our group had ever used Final Cut before so we were all complete beginners because of this we all had a go at trying to edit some raw footage to try to work out and get to grips with the program. I found it very easy to understand how to work the program to edit some footage in order and to the song I also found this quite enjoyable. Jake also seemed to get some good work done.

For the rest of the coursework I did the majority of the editing and Ifeel that this is one technology that i have learnt most from and about.

One thing that I didn't quite understand to begin with was the few different tracks that the footage could sit in.

However, I managed to work out how and why they are used, it makes face paced editing much easier without fiddly movements.

I also added some effects to the video such as some cross dissolves in the slower part of the song at the end and I also added some effects to the whole video to make it look more professional. I created the effect by adjusting the saturation and contrast and some other toggles.This shows the exact adjustments.

Some other technologies which I used during the course work was a handheld video camera I had used one for a small amount of time before to create a very short film so i knew the basics and how to use one but I definitely had more to learn. During the filming of our video for this work I did a fair amount of filming and I now feel I have had a lot of experience using a camera. I would now be confident enough to film alone to create something of my own.

Photoshop is a program which often is used in media studies I was very familiar with this technology and any extra work like our ancillary task is just extra practice for not just the subject but also my own personal gain this the same with all the other technologies.

To create our digipak and advert photoshop was very useful both pieces were entirely created on it. Using many different effects which we have learnt throughout doing this subject. example of some effects used are:

• drop shadows
• inner glow + outer glow
• saturation
• clone stamp
• gradient

As well as using these simple effects we also adjusted these very accurately too to give a very good final product.

Overall I believe that my skills and knowledge about all these things, using the blog, final cut, using cameras and photoshop has hugely increased and i am much better at the things I already knew and i am now good at programs i did not know. I also feel generally more comfortable using computers.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is a hugely important part of the construction of any product.

It is important to find out what other people think about the product not just yourself and members of your group they will do this by telling you what they thought was good and what you did well but more importantly they let you know what they thought were negatives about the video. However, everything said negatively should be taken as constructive criticism to help improve the product.

We carried out some audience feedback by simply asking some friends, some who do media studies as a subject and some who do not so we could get some very different views. We also asked some unknown people therefore they will not give biased views.

Here is some examples of feedback Jake carried out it shows some feed back from 3 media students and one non-media student. They have written 'likes' and 'dislikes'. We collected up a large amount of feedback from different people. We read through them all and found the most common dislikes and then I set about changing it often I replaced it with something that people liked most.

Some common dislikes were often comments such like "There are some shots which are to long" and "there is too much use of strange angles". These were easily changeable and makes the video look so much better. These are also things that I did not notice and neither did the rest of he group this must be because we are watching the video so much and we also find it hard to criticise ourselves.

This all shows that the audience feedback is a very useful process.

The main problem that we seemed to have which most people picked up on was that there were a lot of shots from weird and obscure angles. There is nothing wrong with these shots as they make the video more interesting it is just that they are used too much throughout the video and it does not often break away to something more straight forward. many people said that more shots are needed at a neutral level and needs more shots of the whole band playing together.

To fix this problem I began to use two levels on final cut which gave me the ability to work wider and not in very small spaces.

Here is an example of me filming one of these strange angles, this one being very low. These are the type of shots we needed much less of.

Once we understood what we needed to do to our video there was no 'hanging around' I set straight at re editing the rough cut to what our audience feedback said. After changing the video to what everyone said there should be no major mistakes. minor things that are not very noticeable can be spotted and changed by our group.

Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of our main product and ancillary texts?

We managed to create a very effective combination of our main product and ancillary texts we did this by thinking ahead about the digipak and advert and possibilities of what they could look like and one idea we talked about as a group was to have the actually band performing on them both so Tom used his photography skills and while we were filming he was wasting no time and taking photos of the band in different positions and layouts giving us many choices of what to use for our ancillary texts. pictures like the photo on the right for example.

We also individually took pictures of the band members and their instruments including the mic.

By using the same object's and setting in the ancillary tasks as the video it will show a clear resemblance between each piece of work as people will recognise things from the advert when they see the video and also the same any other way round.

For the digipak the main focus on the cover is of the lead singers guitar edited on photoshop to highly saturate the colour to create an extremely bright red which helps the cover stand out. This is an object from the video which is easily recognisable, the background is a soft focus picture of the band in black and white. The rest of the Digipack is just like this and the advert has the upbove cover featured on it so they are both very obviously related.

Other ways to make these products an effective combination was to use very similar or the same colours, effects, text and font this gave a very subtle similarity. We experimented with many different fonts and effects

We used the same text throughout the tasks.

The colour scheme we used throughout the ancillary tasks was red and black. I attempted to create this theme of red and black in the primary task by adjusting controls on final cut. I did not manage to create a simply red and black look but did get it close, with a red tint and darkened contrast. This is defiantly an improvement that could be made to the product.

Throughout creating all of these products we have been thinking about the target audience to help us make it suitable and appealing to the target which is 14 - 25 year olds who are interested in rock music. I feel that we have created our products to be attractive and eye catching for our target audience. For example the bright outstanding guitar will catch any guitar enthusiasts eye instantly.

In all I think we have created a very effective combination of our main product and ancillary texts with some faults and improvements that could be made for a better combination.

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does our media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Firstly before setting out on creating our media product we had to thourrly research into other existing media product of the same and similar products to fully understand how to go about making a very alike product.

I began looking at other existing digipaks, adverts and videos all in the same genre being rock, this gave many thoughts of forms and conventions to be used.

Different genres of music have some very different conventions for example a hip-hop video are always narritive, through research I did not find one hip-hop video that wasnt narritive. But on the other hand Rock and Metal videos are highly concentrated on the band, instuments and performance often with narritive to complement the video. We decided on creating a video of a performace of the band. After deciding this I did some further research discovering more and different forms and conventions a main point being that the majority of rock videos are shot using the camera handheld this is used mostly for faster paced songs which ours is.

This photo shows myself filming using the camera handheld. The Idea of using a camera handheld without a tripod in sight is that is adds movement to the film, making it feel faster and more exiting stopping viewers from getting bored. Using a camera handheld does not mean you must deliberately shake the camera which we discovered after the first day of filming by doing this the footage by doing this the footage looks very amature. Instead of this the best way to do it is to hold the camera how it feels natural and hold it as still as possible.

A second convention which must be taken into account in all music videos no matter what the genre is the lighting. The lighting is a huge factor in making a piece of film.

We carefully placed some large flood lights at our set to try and light the set and the band with as little amount of shadows as possible. The lighting was important to make the video look professional we purposely over lit the set as we were planning to darken the footage on final cut which would give it a different effect.

Many other videos such as 'Foo Fighters - All My Life' which is also a video of a performance. In this video the creators have clearly thought about the mise-en-scene for this video. This most obvious is a huge sheet or flag as a back drop On this back drop is the logo of the album the song is from 'One by One' and throught the song it changes with the pace of the song. When planning our video we thought about mise-en-scene however there was nothing major that we thought we could add to the video, but we did remove objects from the set and kept some that looked goo such like the large speakers in the background.

For our filming we spent a large amount of time planning shots and practicing them. The different types of shots and angles is an important convention when creating a music video. I created a mood board of shots in videos that i liked and which i wanted to use for the video. Once again there are different types of shots and angles differ between genres.

Target audience

Now we have nearly clompleted the video and the ancilery tasks we must think about who our target audience are so we know who to aim our product at and which magazines the advert should be put in and which sections of a shop to sell the digi pack in to achive maximum sales.
For example Foo Fighters have appeared on the front cover of 'Kerrang!' magazine 27 times in the past (www.fooarchive.com) this is more than any other music magazine so the readers of this magazine must enjoy listening to this band and would like to purcase thier digi pack so this would be a ideal magazine to advertise in
The target audience of this magazine is 16-25 year olds and specific towards rock music fans. However, in recent years, the age of the audience has dropped and it is more 14-17 year olds who tend to buy and read it due to its featured bands being more 'poppy'. (Elliot minor, We Are
The Ocean, 30 Seconds to Mars etc). So will be similar to the audience for our video and other parts.
As the band Foo Fighters are a rock band and the majority of thier fans are male so the target audience will be male 16-25 year old rock music fans.

Rough Cut

After spending hours of my time we have finished a rough cut, it takes up the whole length of the song but has many mistakes and parts which not not look too good. I will go back over the video to perfect it and add more shots as parts of the video have too long shots.

We have carried out some audience research by obtaining their feedback after watching our rough cut. We will ask them to tell us what they thought was good about the video but more importantly what they thought was bad and how it could be improved. This we will then use to create the final cut of the video. But not only using our audience feedback we will also use more of our own ideas and thoughts again.

Editing

No-one in our group had done any editing on final cut so we began by each having a chance at editing some of the video to start with. As i had already edited some of the footage before i already had some experience so the rest of the group had a go.

I was keen to get back to edit as i enjoy this part of the work. Throughout the whole time of editing i spent a large amount of my time working on it i have spent and will continue to spend hours after school some days to complete this video.

Quick practice advert

Here is a very quick Possible magazine advert, it is just a rough design I just used some techniques and effects that could be used for the real advert and digi pack.

Looking at the footage of the 5th day

Looking at the film it was instantly noticeable that it was better than any previous footage and now there is certainly enough to complete the video.

I looked through the whole of our footage and placed markers (using this button ) on the video to show where there was some good shots and the main parts of the song as there is a lot of footage that is very repetitive and so the markers make it easier to find good shots rather than watching through all the footage every time a new shot is needed.

Digi pack and advert mood board

Here i have created a Mood board for our new idea of the ancillery task which is to use close up picture's of the instruments of the band.

This should give us ideas and angles to take the pictures at.

5th day of filming

Our fifth day of filming and hopefully our last. We booked the same place as before and have got the same actors wearing the same clothes as we need it to look as similar as the previous lot of film so we can use both sets.

This should be our most successful day yet as each of us have had a lot of practice from the previous four days of filming.

For this time I have carried out some extra research and thought up many more ideas which should help us when filming.

On previous days I have not done much filming so this time i insisted on filming more myself so I could also film how i would like it and to use my own ideas. I did the majority of the filming on this day with the rest filmed by Jake. Previous experience also taught me that as a group we must take more control over our actors and make them do what we want them to do for our video to look professional, I took this on board and told them to do exactly what i wanted when i wanted this helped hugely in making the filming quicker and getting much more done in the same amount of time as before.

Digi Pack and Magazine Advert.

Both of these products as the ancillary task must relate together and look similar, using the same fonts and colours on the advert as are in the digi pack.

We have changed our Idea for the digi pack from the motor way to a simpler but better looking idea. We have simply decided to have a picture or picture of the instruments used by the band performing. Here I have created a Mood board to help with ideas of different angles and looks of photographs we could take of the guitars and drums.

Yesterday I bought a music magazine 'Rocksound' to use for research into magazine adverts. The majority of this magazine's adverts are for concerts and some for singles and albums but they still all give inspiration. I will also bring some albums i have into school for us to look at for help on how to create the digi pack. Here are some picture's of adverts within the magazine.

Album Digi pack

As a group we must create a digi pack album for the song we are using for our video. This is a 4 page pack with a cover, back and 2 inside pages. The cover needs the most interesting and eye catching artwork and the back needs the track names and will be less interesting than the cover.

Our first idea and most likly to use is a photo that we will take of a motorway at night useing a slow shutter speed on the camera, this will show the cars headlights on the road creating a long line of light here is an example of what we would like.

Editing And Discussion.

After looking at the footage we collected on the 4th day of our filming, we thought that what we had was good however, not enough. This means that we must return to the same location to film some more.

I felt that we had enough footage to begin editing and then have a base on final cut to edit around. This would also give u some practice at editing before we began at the final product, I started editing a small amount for different parts of the video that we had film for.

We did some more planning for the next day of filming which will be our 5th day and hopefully our last.

4th day of filming

The most succes we have had was on this day, we use our planning and lit the setting better and filmed the correct way. This time as a group we took more controll over the band to make them do what we wanted them to do rather than being less forcefull as before. Even with the sucess of this day we still did not capture enough footage which means we will have to return one more time to get more and enough film to create our video.

Planning for 4th day of filming

We are going to use the same location for our next part of our filming however we have changed two of our actors, the lead singer and the drummer this is because they will look far better as members of a rock band. A second change we will make is having extra lighting as the first time the drummer was not well lit enough and practiaclly could not be seen, plus there was a large amount of shadow on the singers face.

A mistake we made before was that we did not hold the camera 'handheld enough' so this time we will change this for better looking footage for a music video.

3rd day of filming

A reasonably succesfull day, we managed to get roughly 1 hour of footage which i

sn't enough for a finished product but we are able to return to the location a

nd film more which we will need to do.

The footage we do have is good and can be used to begin editing. There are a few mistakes we made while filming which makes some shots unusable this is because we left some things on the floor which were in shot. another mistake we made was that all the shots were too static and not 'handheld enough'. As very little of this can be used we must return to the location and film far more.

Planning for 3rd day of filming

New location, same song, new ideas.

We are going to use the same ideas which we had for the previous location plus some extra ideas which we came up with, we practiced these shots during school in a empty room to help us when we film.

meeting after 2nd day of filming

After the unsuccesful day of filming we viewed the footage we had and none of us were very pleased with any of it. however, it was only the setting and lighting that did not look good so the shots that we filmed were good practice for future filming. we went through the footage and picked out shots that we liked to use again at the next setting.

Now we had to decide where to film next, we came up with some more ideas of locations the most likely and possible was The Red Lion in Northfleet. This location is an actual venue and has good lighting so it should look far better than our previous location.

2nd day of filming for Time Like These

The location we had chosen for the filming is a local scout hall which has a lot of space and first we thought would be perfect as our location.

However, we began to film and using our planned shots which looked ok but this showed that the location was not good enough and we could not cover the walls to look professional.

This day was good practice for future filming we have been able to try out different ideas and techniques so we did not waste any time there even though we knew that we were very unlikely

t0 use the film be had but we continued as it was good practice.

After this we decided to leave and discuss at a next meeting of what to do for the next day of filming.

Times Like These: Planning

For this song we are going to stick with the idea of a performance of the song however this time with this song it will be very different. We will have a performance of a band.

We are going to storyboard all our planned shots which will help us to remember when we come to film.

There are many parts of this song which have interesting parts for each instrument and vocals throughout these parts of the song the video will be concentrated around these instruments for example a drumroll or guitar solo.

As this is a rock song it is rather fast paced and we will not be using static shots the whole video will be shot handheld. The location we have chosen for the filming of this video is the venue Leos in northfleet.

Before we will go there to film we will practice our planned shots very roughly during a lesson at school we will also use this as reference while filming.

Times Like These lyric analysis

I, I'm a one-way motorway
I'm the road that drives away
Follows you back home

I, I'm a streetlight shining
I'm a white light blinding bright
Burning off alone

It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again

I, I'm a new day rising
I'm a brand new sky to hang
The stars upon tonight

I, I'm a little divided
Should I stay or run away
Leave it all behind

It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again

It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again

It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again

This song i think is about a relationship or re-committing to a relationship which lost something and became dull and the couple are trying to make it work by adding some 'flavor'. He loves her but wonders if he should give it up to find that fire of love again.

'I'm a little divided' shows that he is drawn between the decision of weather to 'stay or run away'.

Change of song

After our unsuccessful day of filming we had a group meeting and discussion about what to go about doing now. There were many problems with our filming first being the location and lighting not looking very professional and very amateur. our second problem was that our actor did not know the song very well which made filming him playing it very difficult. Thirdly our general organization of the day was not done well, far more self discipline was needed and will be needed for future filming.

A decision was made once again to change the song, but this time to a song very different and to make a very different video. The new song we have chosen is Foo Fighters - Times Like These.

Our first idea is a performance of a band playing the song.

First day of filming: 1st location

On this first day of filming we had planned to get shots of a performance of the song with our actor singing and playing the guitar to the song.

We had planned to be able to film all day on the saturday however, due to unforeseen circumstances we were only able to use a few hours of the day. Also our actor at short notice could not do sunday, this gave us a very small amount of time to film
At the location we were setting up lighting and the camera while doing this it seemed that we were rather unprepared for the filming ahead.

at the end of the day we only had a few minutes of film. And as a group we decided not much of it was very good.

So at our next meeting we will discuss any ideas and changes we could make for a more successful video.

Storyboarding

As a group we began drawing and writing some storyboards as a plan for shot and order of our video. We first began the story boarding by writing timings of the song of change of lines, verses and chorus. This gave us a basis to create or shots around and when to be showing narrative to the performance of the song.

This storyboard will help us keep organized and will prevent us as a group from finishing at a scene without a shot which we wanted as it will remind us after looking through it.

Once finishing the storyboard with all pictures and notes we will copy them on to the computer and create a animatic to show an even more accurate example of what our video will be created.