Final Print Work

Advert:

Digipak:

Finished Music video

• This is the final cut for our music video, we are pleased with the outcome, and have had very positive feedback from fellow media students, teachers and friends.
• The strengths of our video we believe was the narrative. We had focused a lot on the mise-en-scene of the video, making sure the location, lighting and weather was all appropriate for the video, and that it would work well in contrast with the performance, which we made sure to film on a sunny day, so it appears hyper-realistic, and conforms to Dyers theory, making the performer appear extraordinary.
• Other strengths of our video include the balance between the performance, and the narrative. it was acknowledged that we had a good cutting rate between them, and made sure the versus were focused on the narrative, but had a deeper focus on the performance during the chorus of the song.
• Some weaknesses of our video included the fact that we could have had more singing from the performer, as we only had a small amount of it, people felt that it needed to be clearer that she was the singer and was trying to represent the artist.
• Another would be that we could have used more locations to keep it entertaining for our audience by changing the surroundings, or possibly even cross cut between the narrative, and manipulating time between the anti-social actions.

GC: Editing development

• Today after having all the clips lined up, it was clear that the performance needed some differentiation from the narrative. So in order to achieve this effect I placed a lens light leak clip over all the performance shots on video line 4. I then set the opacity of each leans light leak clip to about 35% before taking it down to 25% after playing the footage back and realising that the light leak footage was too dominant over the performance.
• This done, Andy created some title text using Adobe Photoshop which I then imported into the Premiere file to use as text overlays on some of the opening shots to be used as titles for the video. It was as simple as dragging the image onto the timeline on top of the desired shots and setting the opacity to the right level so as not to make the text appear too dominant but still enable it to be easily legible.
• Once all this was done it was simply a job of tweaking the video to iron out any minor faults. This included one lip syncing performance shot which had been nudged one or two frames out of time and cutting down one narrative shot before time stretching another very slightly in order to ensure the visuals cut in time with a drum beat on the track.

Filming shoot reflection

• We did our final filming shoot on Sunday 8/12/13. During which we filmed the ending of our video, making sure we had the complete narrative and that the video had an ending, which we believed would be fitting, but at the same time be the climax of our video, which is when the video becomes controversial by including death, and breaks the stereotypes of the characters, and makes you challenge the ideologies of people. It will then allow the audience to decide for themselves who they believe were the victim in the video.
• The strengths of the shoot were that we managed to film a convincing narrative, with a wide variety of movement and angles. We made sure it had a thrilling ending, and believed it related well to the narrative we wanted.
• The weaknesses of our shoot, were the time restrictions as we were busy that day we had to film early and try and make sure we had enough footage filmed in the time we had. We managed to achieve this, but some shoots could have been re-filmed or shot from a different perspective or angle.
• If we were to film again, I believe that it would be very similar, however we would make sure to plan in detail, and know exactly what we need to get done. We could have also attempted in filming many different ending to the video and see which one we believed worked the best, so we could have edited them a bit more and maybe combined a variety of shots, to increase the cutting rate, and make it appear more dramatic than it was.

GC: Editing development

• During the past few days, I have developed the video significantly. First of all after the final shoot (strangling scene), I simply selected the usable footage and dragged it onto the timeline in order to roughly cut it up and see the order in which the shots went. After this, because it filled up so much of the timeline, I was forced to cut it down further in order to make it fit.
• On top of this, I then re-arranged all three scenes (shoplifting, car theft, strangling), into order. This was important as these three scenes were the basis for our video. After positioning them I had to select some of the weaker shots to cut out in order to make all the scenes fit in. Also, where there were some cuts that did not make complete sense, I had to mark where these were on the timeline by dragging the two shots up onto the 'video 2' line so I would know where I absolutely had to cut in performance shots to ensure the narrative made sense.
• Also I used marker points on the timeline in order to mark where the key turning points in the track were, such as where singing started/stopped, and where the music dropped. These markers were helpful as they enabled me to line up appropriate shots in order to help sync the visuals and audio together to enhance audience understanding.
• After Andy had lined up all the lip syncing for the performance to the music, this allowed me to easily see where I needed to cutaway from the narrative to include singing to the camera shots. This in turn meant I didn't spend time editing the clips around the track only to find out I had missed out on a chance to intercut performance.
• I used the 'video 3' line to display to singing parts of the performance and then the 'video 4' line in order to display the performance shots that were not singing. This made it easier to identify which clips I had left to cut in, and also it meant that I could drag the performance shots over the top of the narrative without having to cut the narrative footage to save time.

GC: Print work development

• Our final versions of the print work are slightly altered compared to the last development post. Firstly, we were happy with the overall look of the advert except for the fact everything was over on the left hand side. So in order to counteract this, we came to the decision to stretch the text that said 'With Myon and Shane 54 feat. Tove Lo' out so it reached the other side of the page. Not only did this make the advert feel less like everything was on the left hand side, it also made the text slightly more legible.
• Another minor alteration to the advert was the font of the text that said 'Strangers'. In order to link the advert to the digipak we needed to have a consistent font between the two. We used the same font we had on the digipak and applied it to the advert. On top of this we then reduced the opacity down to about 50% as having the text dark black made it stand out a bit too much and ruined the leading line.
• A minor adjustment to the poster as a whole was that we moved all the text up slightly to fill out the space a bit more and to help make the 'Seven Lions' text stand out more as it was contrasted against a darker background due to the gradient at the top.
• The digipak had a little more work done to it. We added another pane which included our performance actor which we felt helped relate to both the video and the advert. We enlarged it and used the contrast/brightness tools to give it a black and white effect. The enlarged size along with high contrast and brightness meant that we were easily able to add a short paragraph of text about the artist which we wanted to include somewhere on the digipak to help promote artist image as someone the audience could relate to rather than constructing a hyper real star like we did with the performance aspect of the video. This is also another reason we decided to turn the image of the performance actor into black and white: so as to maintain the hyper real star image that is given to her in the video and advert.
• Text was added to the back panel which included a web link to the artist Seven Lions along with a track list and copyright information. We didn't want the copyright information to alter the leading line of the back panel so we used the character adjustment tool to make the text much thinner and reduce the spacing between each letter in order to condense the writing to fit in-between the barcode and the record label logo. We then changed the font colour to white to make it visible over the background image.
• The Soundcloud link was placed at the top of the page so as not to interfere with the track list. Also to aid this a different font was chosen to help further differentiate the web link from the track list.
  
• The track list its self used the same font that was used to state the featuring artists to keep the theme of the advert and digipak going. This also allowed the white space created by adjusting the brightness of the background image to be filled easier as the font used was tall and skinny.
• The last change was the sleeve we added between the front and back cover. Because the two images were similar but used different colour alteration techniques, they clashed when they met and the back cover image looked out of place. We feel that the white sleeve broke them up enough to not make the back cover look too out of place. We decided to just put the main artist and the song title on there to stop it from looking too crowded as there was not much room on the sleeve. We then put the Seven Lions logo in the middle of both pieces of text to help separate them both.

Group: Rough Cut and Print Work Developent

• Here is the almost finished work of our print work, showing our advert, which we believe to be almost finished, and our digipak which is still currently in development.
• Our advert needs a few points adjusting before we believe it is finalised, one in particular we believe that the typography used for the word 'Strangers' needs to be changed to something more fitting for the advert, and that relates to the digipak and music video.
• The digipak is still being made currently, and we are positive that the front cover is finished, as we have had numerous praises of it, and are confident it links well with the posters as well as believing it comes across as a realistic album cover. The rest needs improving, but we are confident with our print work overall, and believe it will be very successful. 

• Our music video is still in production, and are about halfway through the editing, we have gathered all of the necessary clips, and are left to edit them together and make it appear conventional of a music video.
• We have the middle section of the video in our rough cut, some needs altering such as the performance aspect which may need switching out, but the narrative and cutting rate we believe is working well throughout.

Feedback rough cut

Not able to give any boys as the video and print are not here. No posts on the blog since Tuesday either?