Update on filming, 30th November 2011

Today are plans to shoot the concert sequence were going to be put into action. This was by far the biggest, most difficult and eventful filming we had done so far for the video. We were sceptical on how it would turn out because of so many problems that could occur and the shear unpredictability of the shooting. We were very determined to add this as to the video as it would empathise our creativity of shots used in the video, and also it is a vital scene within the narrative of the video. The lunchtime on the day we were able to gather around 60 students from years 13 and 12 and take them to the drama studio to start filming. There were three camera men filming and it was vital that they didn’t get in the shot of the others. Despite a few problems occurring such as people messing around and a broken microphone, we gathered enough footage to compress and observe the footage to decide whether to finalise it into sequences of events or re-shoot it. We were very pleased with the outcome of the footage and decided to finalise it into our video.

update on filming, 29th November 2011

For the last few days, I and the group sat down and had a serious discussion about the last gaps that were missing in our music video. What we had achieved so far was brilliant however there was something missing. We all had to try to figure out what it was and how that could turn it from great to brilliant. We watched back what we had already put together and there was a noticeable difference in the comparison of narrative to performance shots used. We therefore had to try and create unique way of shooting these performance shot compared to the shots already used. We are all a huge fan of Coldplay and throughout the lesson, decided to watch the song “paradise" to see what performance shots are used and whether it could inspire us to form some of our own performance shots, which it did. We saw an obvious idea that we never thought to include which was of a concert performance. We agreed that this is just what we needed to fill up the gaps, so we organised a date on Tuesday the 30th to create this concert scene for our video. We also further added this idea to fit in with the narrative of the video. We decided to lead the character into a concert where he is chosen by the band to come up on stage and sing. The band realises the potential he has and decide to let him join the band.

We had to dicded where to choose the location for the concert, and because i took theatre studies we used the downstairs drama studio to film. We adjusted the lighting and added some steps to replicate the stage of the concert:

i took a rough video to get a perspective on what type of shots we could possibly use for this scene.

final magazine advert

This is my final magazine advert we created. We found that by observing this there is a clear sense of importance from the artist which works well in relation to the urban background as it creates an effective contrast of dull and bright. We also noticed the brand identity between this magazine advert and my digipak cover and also the music video is noticeable and all has a similar aspect of urbanisation identification of the artist as we have set out to try and achieve a memorable looking band. I felt that the text 'The Black Eyed Peas' in gold combined with the background of the four artists works well and makes the magazine advert stand out towards audiences. The use of black and white and the artists in colour also stands out and makes it clear who the artists are and shows a clear relationship between one another.

editing our magazine advert

When we agreed to use this photo as the magazine advert, we spent no time wasting and went straight into Photoshop to see how we could edit this picture. We were advised by our teacher to not over do the photo on the editing perspective, and to keep it simple, clear but effective.

We loaded the image up onto Photoshop. After doing this, I decided to attempt to create my initial idea previously thought for the front cover of the digipak which was by using different effects, to enhance the artist announcement for the upcoming album and instantly make them more noticeable as a band to empathise that we are promoting them. By doing this I wanted them to stand out in the foreground to create a more direct address to the audience. First, I used the history brush tool to create a dim grey background but keeping the artists in colour artist we were promoting therefore making them stand out. We then used tools to give the magazine advert a professional finish which included the same font ‘praetorian’ used for the digipak and created stars using the shapes tool to create a rating for our advert.

The font added to the authenticity of an urban appearance however as we are also trying to promote the band, the text as a whole looked too bland and didn't stand out enough to grab audience’s attention. This led me and my group to using another font with a bolder colour effect to achieve this. After choosing the appropriate font, we used a gold highlighted colour effect to portray a wealthy symbol to create a contrast between the wealth and the clear lack of it (empathised by the grey colour) from the urban background.

We then had to create information about the band and upcoming album we were promoting. We took the iTunes logo and made it clear as to where it is available on. to make it stand out we used the brush tool to gently highlight in white the surrounding areas around the logo, then using the blur tool, effectively added a professional and smooth finish to it.

The development was fairly simple yet we believed the outcome showed us an effective advert which stood out because of the contrast of colours, customised logo to add our own style to it, and the creative compositing of the artists. 

Ideas towards our magazine advert

With regards to the creation of our digipak, some of the ideas we originally thought of didn’t get used for the finalised digipak. This however made the idea process of creating a magazine advert much easier as we already had some creative ideas.

At first, we decided that the idea of the band as a whole stand evenly in a line with the lead member standing forward to empathise his importance. we also would have them stand on a train track which creates an authentic urban background. However when we observed this picture in greater detail, concerns was raised as to where we would be able to fit all of the information and advertisement reviews. This led us to discard the image as a whole and perhaps base our image on a similar version to one of the digiapk images.

We decided to choose the inside cover of our digipak, except add some creative effects to set the two images apart so that the audience can gain a clear insight into which advertisement is which. We wanted to create a large amount of thinking space when creating the inside cover of our digipak and this allowed the image to have a lot of space to indicate reflection and room to breathe so that the focus is purely on the artist and nothing else. Because of the large amount of space we thought it would be the easiest image to fit as much information that we wanted.

We uploaded the image onto to get a general perspective on how it would look in term of composition and where to place all of the advertisement information.

magazine advert analysis

The artists of this music poster advert are from the Black Eyed Peas. They are promoting their fourth studio album “Monkey Business” The bands as artists are unlike what we see in the music world today. As you can see, the artists have their own individual style of appearance to the advert. They have purposely shown themselves to be rebellious as they are all doing what they want to do. Taboo who is the rapper in the lower middle is creating more of the focus on him because of his noticeable   hand gesture. They present themselves as a fun and diverse band to the audience which indicates that they are promoting they’re album and representation as pleasantly and widely to all audiences as possible.

The colours that have been used for this magazine advert have been chosen for a particular reason. The specific colour of red is used in the background with subsidiary colours of black and gold which signifies a broad persona of royalty. These colours are quite fresh and look like they belong to a circus theme. To justify this suggestion further the album name is called “monkey business” which adds to the wildness and excitement of the band. The colours consist mainly of quite dull red and yellow which are so it doesn’t take the attention off the information about new album and them as artists. The bands clothes are not wearing anything particularly vibrant, just similar colours to the background however the majority of the colours in which they are wearing are black which creates an attractive eye catching contrast of the red background.

The font is quite stylised to fit the bands stylised image. The artists name and the album name is in the same font style which implies that there is an equal balance of promotion. The ‘Y’ and ‘A’ are in particularly stylised as they have been joined at the middle to make it a cross sign to signify that they have created their own flavour of style to the text.

The composition is not a usual poster that we see on billboards and magazines. This could be due to that they are a contemporary RnB/ Hip- Hop band with conventions of different genres of music to try and appeal them as a band to a wider audience. The only female singer of the band Fergie is placed on the side of the band however her expression and use of different personalised costume especially carries the attitude as she is representing a role model for all women that The Black Eyed Peas give the impression that they are here to introduce a different style of music.

The magazine advert does not provide a lot of information for the audience. The main information that they have included is the title and album name. The font has been made very bold as this is very important information for the audience however there is no additional information about the album such as; release date, availability, website etc.

This poster seems to just be an up scaled version of Jay Z's album Kingdom Come. All urban adverts seem to have an empowering image of the artist, utilising a convention that shows off the genre for example with Jay Z he is modelling the NY cap this connotes the idea of the 'hood' and urban life.

The face of jay-z is very clear and noticeable which gives him an iconic status of importance for the audience to recognise. This is a vital aspect of advertisement especially within the industry of RnB because the majority of artists are soloists and compete for the most recognisable face. However this is what makes the Black Eyed Peas unique and stand out from others.

We can see the use of dark red, black and white colours. The colours from this advert are simplistic yet effectively as it creates a persona for what the music from the album is like. As they are much muted colours it could signify quite deep and emotional music but not hugely upbeat.

The layout from this advert is very detail with information provided for the upcoming album. The Again this is a key convention

The artists of this music poster advert are again from the Black Eyed Peas. However they are promoting their new style of music and advertising to show this, they’re new contemporary style album “the beginning”. As you can see, the artists have their own individual modern style of appearance to the advert. ‘will-I-am’ is dressed in a noticeable white suit which empathises his importance and leadership as the leading band member.

The colours in this image are plain and bland using mostly white and grey white which could signifies that they no longer fit into the genre of RnB because of their new genre they are appealing to categorise into which is mainly Hip-Hop/techno. It also creates the sense of excessive wealth and purity with regards to each individual, and the band as a whole.

The magazine advert does not provide a lot of information for the audience. The main information that they have included is the title and album name. The font has been made very bold as this is very important information for the audience however there is no additional information about the album such as; release date, availability, website etc. 

  The font, though quite small, creates a futuristic persona for the band and perhaps indicates the new uses of technological devices to help influence and combine with their music.

The last four letters of the word Billboard has been filled in with different colours which symbolises a unique style that the band has and that they are trying to set out being different by how their medium looks.

conventions of a magazine advert

Conventions of music mag advert

View more presentations from Sam Benzie.

update on filming, 26th November 2011

Today myself and one of my group members Aaron went into Lincoln to film some footage for the second verse. This footage is of the different events that occur as the main character walks past them. We were  limited again to the amount of people we could use for the video on that day,therefore I came up with the solution to simply gather lots of different clothing so that each person can wear a differnt costume but still be in different shots  indicating a different character in a different event. However this was providing that they covered they're faces for other events if they had already appeared in. We solved this problem out by already bringing clothing to cover the face such as:

• scarf's
• hooded jumpers
• large hats/caps
• glasses

magazine advert

After finalising our digipak, we then had to move on to the creation of a magazine advert. This was so we could all be introduced to another in depth technique to promote our music video and explore this type of advertisement. We had to create a promotion package for the release of an album and creating magazine advert was an effective way of promoting our video. Here is a list of the features we had to include with regards to promoting our video:

• music promo video
• a cover for your music video's release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package)
• A magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).
• Optional-word of mouth advertisement.

final digipak

This is our finalised digipak:

what I admire about this front cover is the clear unity of the band which signifies a strong relationship between each other. the long passage way works effectively as it indicates that they have all experienced a journey and the close up  and direct address of the artist suggest that they have reached that goal and have overcome the journey. the font works well too as it sets an urbanised perspective for the band.

 The inside cover for the digpak i feel that we wanted to create a large amount of thinking space when creating the inside cover of our digipak and this allowed the image to have a lot of space to indicate reflection and room to breathe so that the focus is purely on the artist and nothing else. We also noticed the clear brand identity from the digipak cover and also the music video is noticeable and all has a similar aspect of urbanisation identification of the artist as we have set out to try and achieve a memorable looking band. Overall though simple, it works effectively as it demonstrate the reflection from the characters.

This is perhaps my favourite image really empathises the artists emotion and suffering well and that he reflecting about his life and looking out towards the distance and in a sense searching for help. I felt this image worked well in terms of the location and the over the shoulder shot and also the lighting of the image. I admire the sense of searching for something from the character with the scale of the huge city next to him. It is overwhelming to notice the intense reflection of awareness from this image and shows the realism of what the modern society to become.

final idea for front cover of digipak

The deadline was become a concern as it was drawing nearer and nearer and we still had no finalised front cover, I decided to gather the band member and take the still camera and get George to drive to the market rasen library. This was in all honesty the first location I came up with regards to considering what we were going to do for the front cover. Another concern was that break time was the only available time I could gather the entire band members enable for me to take some still photos and we only had around 15 minutes to achieve this. None the less, we took some creative photos of the whole band and one in particular caught my attention the most.

final idea for back cover of digipak

We concluded that this was the finalised back cover. Soon after we encountered difficulties towards making it look like a professional digipak back cover album. We started off by creating a bar code for our back cover. We used a bar code generator website to customize our own bar code. Soon after we created our professional bar code,which we then added it to the back cover of our digipak.

http://www.barcodesinc.com/generator/index.php

Our next task was to add a copyright logo and label to the back cover to simply to portray a profession finish. We personalized our own copyright label and simply extracted the logo from Google images.

After this, we added all of the additional information such as a website and copyright details. The last convention we had to achieve which was vital for the creation of a back cover digipak was the track listing. We researched actually songs from one of the Black Eyed Pea’s album for us to further use. We noticed that there are frequently only around 8 songs in an album which lead us to create only 8 songs. We realised we had a lot of space at the top of the back cover which allowed us to put enough songs on yet, still retaining the view of the city.

Final idea for inside cover for our digipak

When we took the picture the inside cover of our digipak, I thought we should add some sort of Photoshop effect to enhance the creativity of the image because in my opinions it was too simple. However we took into consideration that we were not trying to make it look professional, we were empathising the message and sense of reflection we wanted to get across to the audience. This lead us to just leave the image as it is as we had already achieved what we initially intended.

back cover ideas

The back cover was perhaps the easiest cover to finalise as it mainly had to be a simple photo with all of the details included. this didn't mean to say that we didn't put a lot of thought into it, but our ideas flowed better and we all agreed instantly what we thought at the time that the shot of me against a wall would be finalised as our back cover.

We began editing this photo using adobe Photoshop.once we loaded the picture on there, our main priority was to create any titles for the artist and information.Therefore we decided to attempt to create titles on the website: www.dafont.com

I tried experimenting with various fonts but found that the font 'patinio graffiti' was best suited for our digipak and we all agreed it suited the genre well and met with the idea of graffiti style connoting the urban style of our "where is the love" music video. However once it was put into perspective we realised that it was too radiant which we felt didn't fit in with the feel of our music. never the less, we tried to create it so it matched with the gloomy,run down element of the video.although after spending hours using tool on Photoshop such as: drop shadow, gradient tool, colour overlay,different blending tool ect, we felt that the graffiti font wasn't ideal for our back cover but with the amount of time we all put into create the title, we thought for the time to just leave it to at least give us an idea of how to compose the back cover.

When we thought we had finished the back cover we asked our teacher teacher Mr Benzie to observe it and to give us his onset feedback. He disagreed with this shot as he said that this shot firstly lacked a bit of creation and thought as it didn't match with the dull run down urban setting approach towards our other ideas and most importantly the music video itself. He also asked why the other band member with me on the back cover. we didn't think once about the group as a whole on the back cover which instantly convinced to not use this shot as the finalised back cover and to try and create a new more urban like photo shot.

This shot was taken by one of my group members Aaron to just get a rough outlook of what this type of shot would suit as the back cover. We all once looking back at the shot, disagreed completely as it went against everything what our teachers advised us not to do.

On the 12th of November myself and Aaron went into Lincoln purely to take some creative shots for our digipak. we decided to visit the locations that we used for filming and see whether it looked urban and run down enough for us to take pictures for the cover. We got into Lincoln at a good time because it was a clear sky and was just as the sun was setting which could if we got it right imply my reflection to what had happened with the storyline of the music video.

We went to the steepest location in Lincoln to capture these last few shots, however this one particular shot stood out for me and Aaron as it was just what we were looking for as a back cover. Although the next day we showed tom all of the pictures we took and suggested that this photo was definitely going to be used as the back cover. Tom disagreed about the photo which lead to a bit of argument, but once Aaron stepped in and agreed with me that he wanted to use this shot, Tom decided that it could work and allowed this shot to be the back cover.

inside cover ideas for our digipak

The creation of our inside cover was fairly easy as we were able to construct an appropriate image using some of the brief ideas we previous thought of for the front cover of our digipak. We decided to use the idea of the four band member sitting down looking in one direction at the train station. We thought this idea could attain the sense of reflection and questioning which we intended to create from the digipak. Within the next few days we gathered a group of people (the band members, and the models to give a rough outlook of the shot) and set out to the train station to take the shots. Along the way I decided to take another shot of just Aaron (the thief) jumping over the wall just to see if it would turn out beneficial enough for an inside cover if all else failed.

This first shot is not of the member, but by the model figures who volunteered to take part in the shot. This shot was only to see how to compose it and to mainly see whether the shot met the expectation of the idea, which it did.

This shot was just a improvised shot i did just to whether i was able to interpret it correctly when taken on a camera.

This were rough shots taken of our inside cover idea for our digipak.We had arranged another day to take this shot so the rough shots that we took were only experimental and going to be used for editing purposes.

front cover ideas for our digipak

The front cover surprisingly even though we were all told to create the ideas and finalise it first, ended up becoming one of the last things we did towards making our final digipak. All of us as a group struggled deeply when it came to creating the front cover mainly because of the importance it had to us to make it perfect and trying to make it stand out from other digipaks. We had many discussions about which idea we should actually use for the front cover, and eventually accepted that Aaron idea should be our front cover of our digipak.

We then set our priorities to getting rough shot so we could get a basis of how we were going to compose our front cover. However once we found some appropriate locations to take the shots, we thought that one of the other ideas that we decided not to use as the front cover would fit perfectly within this location inside the school. Whilst taking these pictures we got slightly sidetracked and focused more on the idea that we said that we were not going to use and not on the main idea, which made us all start to realise that maybe we made the wrong decision for our front cover.  

Here is an example of one of the shots taken for the idea of the two characters looking opposite at each other suggesting that the main character when looking in the mirror, all he sees in himself is the thief. At first we weren’t considering of using this idea for the front cover, however the more shots we took (including this one) we all began to admire it more at started debating whether to use this idea instead of our original front cover idea.

This shot is of the original front cover idea that we agreed to use. we noticed that there is only one person in the background at that time, this was due to partly the limited time we had that day to take the pictures which lead to us being unable to gather the band members for the photo however we knew it was early stages of the creation of our digipak therefore we only really wanted a rough outlook of how this idea will look taking in account the there is only one person in the background.

These photos are again shots of our idea of the two characters looking opposite at each other which is this time set in a new location. I admired the pale white background as it could allow us to easily use some effective editing techniques which might of not been able to achieve with the brick wall picture as there was too much happening in that picture already.

This photo was just a quick and simple thought that i decided to try out just to see whether simplisity is more effective rather than all the hassle and trying to create something creative and eye catching. at first there were mixed views towards this shot however once we looked back at all the other possible front cover ideas,we were all certain that this shot didn't meet up to the standard and effectiveness of the other shots.

One lunchtime we gathered around 5 people to come with us to the train station to take some group photo shots for the front cover as we were running out of time and had no group shots for our front cover. we used our models to create a rough composition of the shot so we could work it what needed changing and keeping.

These shots were taken towards the end of our idea exploration for the creation of our front cover. We thought that because we already finalised the back cover of the lead character looking into the Lincoln city suggesting I am looking for the thief, we came up with the idea of that we should have just the thief running out of the shot almost giving the impression that he is trying to run out of the front cover, then when you turn the digipak you will see the lead character (the one chasing the thief) in the same left hand corner searching for him. We were all at the time motivated that this will finally be our creative finalised front cover. However the more shots we took, the more difficult our idea began to sink in, which lead to a lot of frustration regarding whether we could achieve this shot in such short time. Soon after we realised that it wasn’t possible and we just had to move on to an easier but still creative idea.

when we looked back and reflected on these pictures, we convinced ourselves that it was extremely unlikely that it would work and end up as the front cover. this once again lead to me and tom arguing over how little time we had left to get the front cover shot taken and added to the final digipak. i argued how we could do it again considering the limited time we had last time, however he argued how this seemed like a creative idea although simply wouldn't work very well as seen in the pictures. eventually i agreed and we moved on this idea and attempted to create another possible idea before the deadline.