Evaluation ~ Luke Leadbetter

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


Our media product does a mix of both conforming and challenging current trends and forms in media products. The music video goes against the typical style and conventions commonly found in music videos of the Electronica/ Dance genre. It does this through several ways, one of which being the lighter, happier atmosphere, not commonly found in Electronica videos. Also, continuing this challenge against typical Electronica, is the use of Will's puppet. The puppet contrasts the normal dense, heavy atmosphere held by Electronica videos, but also sticks to the way Daft Punk present themselves through their videos, for example in Technologic and Da Funk, the main character of the video is not human, nor do they have a clear identity. Our video uses conventions commonly found in music video, such as a variety of camera angles and shots, particularly close ups. Also the video is not made up of entirely static shots, it contains a fair amount of camera movement , making the video appear to be more fast paced, less boring, and more inkeepng with typical conventions of music video. Our video also contains a variety of performance, abstract and narrative features. This is common for many music videos and it is becoming increasingly less likely to see new music videos showing just one of these aspects.

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


I think that the style of the Digipak suits the video well. The light blue representing the Electronica genre of the song, and giving a real digital edge, linking to the theme of the video and song (Particularly the song name). The main image of the Digipak being an old commodore 64 does well to demonstrate the way we are escaping the norm of the Electronica genre, moving away from the modern, clinical style of current Electronica videos, and instead focusing on the older, retro side of technology. This is also to represent the love for technology back when it was first becoming popular, and relating this love to the song title and Daft Punk's approach to their music. The use of Daft Punk's logo on the screen of the commodore is there to relate to Daft Punk's other album covers and adverts, making it instantly recognisable. The font used is also sticking to the retro, digital theme. This retro style is carried on throughout the digipak, the inserts showing images of retro commodore and spectrum games. Wittily replacing the characters of the games with 16 bit graphics of Daft Punk links to the humour we've tried to present in places of our video, through the use of the puppet. The advert links well with the Digipak, especially because of the use of the digipak cover as the main image in the advert. This was done to follow the conventions of Daft Punk's own adverts, as previously blogged. The colours in the advert follow the same trends as the digipak, linking to the same parts of our production. I think that the use of font on the advert could have been more effective if it had been more digital looking, for example use of the font 'OCR A EXTENDED'.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?


Our original plan was to gather audience feedback at the completion of our product and then apply the feedback to the product. By having finished the product apart from the changes they suggested, we figured it would make it easier to gain feedback and edit what was suggested. Unfortunately due to our own lack of time, organisation and ability we were unable to finish the product until late into the editing process. This is very much a shame as audience feedback is very important to us and would've greatly helped us improve our video. Throughout the creation of our product we have received some small comments, mainly from our teachers, with suggestions to improve their dislikes of our video. At first we were told that our project was too adventurous and too similar to the Owl City - Firelflies video. We promptly ignored this and continued working. Today the teacher that told us this told me that we were right to ignore them and we have proven them wrong, which I must say, was very satisfying. Since the completion of our video, we have asked our target audience of 17 - 21 years old, what they thought of our video. We received very encouraging responses with few criticisms, which was very pleasing to hear.

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


In constructing our product there was a lot of use of technology. When filming our video we used cameras, which, while not being high-tech, were still a challenge to use efficiently and to the best effect. On the Mac's provided by the school we were supplied with the editing software Final Cut Express. This near industry standard software was at times challenging to understand, but rewarding when you took the time to explore it. Through using this technology I learned and developed a lot of new skills in editing. For research the web was very useful. Web 2.0 has made it very easy to find information, video and images across the Internet. Through this we have created this Blog, found images for our research and used online freeware to create snazzy presentations. One of these online software products is called Prezi, this program took a while to get to grips with but once you did the results were awesome. The ability to create zooming, sweeping and high quality presentations adds another level to the presentations we made with it. Also among the online technologies we used was slideshare. Slideshare is a really useful online tool for turning Microsoft Powerpoint presentations into web and blog friendly Flash presentations, allowing easy presentation of the storyboard and other planning and research. The use of video, audio playback and images has also been of great reward during this coursework. In the evaluation stage I really should have used more technology, but unfortunately due to time constraints this was impractical, which is a shame as I would have loved to have combined several media types to create a really engaging evaluation.

Overall I think that the project has been a real insight into media creation. The use of technologies has really expanded my knowledge and skills, as well as giving me a brief insight into the flaws with such technologies. I am very pleased with our production as a whole, there are places that could be improved, but some of them are due to hardware constraints, for example the image quality could have been much much higher. The ancillary tasks have been, unfortunately, a bit neglected through our focus on the main product. If I was to do this again I would be much more aware of my time management, and aware of the spread of work between the group members, so that not too much falls on some members whilst other are left not doing as much (though admittedly through their own choice). I greatly appreciate the chance to do this project and have really enjoyed it.

Luke Leadbetter

Evaluation ~ William Dixon

In what ways does your Media Product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

We used a lot of inspiration for our music video with other videos out there. The concept, which has been compared to a lot, is "Fireflies" Music Video by Owl City. As it is the same form of it's in a bedroom, things are coming to life around him in a stop motion form. So in a sense we did use this form to create our music video, using the same basic idea. An idea that we developed on was Daft Punk's own "Da Funk" music video. This conveyed the idea of hidden identity with the dog mask and the fact that nobody was establishing the fact that he had one on. So we developed on that idea with creating something gives a hidden identity idea. Which brings me on to the last point which is what we did to challenge other videos which was that used a puppet. Yes puppets had been used in other videos before, but in Electronica music, it's not all that common. Because electronic is very abstract music, most music videos are very abstract and not meant to be taken literally. So we used the idea of a puppet to challenge that idea, but with the fact that the music is electronica, our puppet is in fact not meant to be taken literally at all.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary task? 

Our main product, the music video, has a very planned meta narrative of hidden identity, music creation, and retro features. The ancillary task has exactly the same features. With the hidden identity of the puppet in the music video, we create the effect of the hidden identity that Daft Punk use. With our ancillary task, we used the Daft Punk identity embedded in the retro games with the 8 bit characters to create that hidden identity once again, thus adding to the meatanrrative. The music creation is conveyed with the keyboard playing and puppet playing the guitar. With the ancillary task, the front cover is the very retro computer which conveys the idea of electronica, and electronica is mainly created on a PC so this too fits the idea of music creation. The retro features in the main product is the lamp, keyboard, one of the phones and the laptop. This creates the metanarrative of a look into the past of Daft Punk's history from when they were first starting out as two people experimenting with music ideas. With ancillary task, the retro game screen shots, the retro PC and font gives the same effect and combines to give the look into the past in both aspects. So the combination of both the main product and the ancillary task create a very effective metanarrative giving a whole combination of thoughts and effects.

What have you learned from your audience feedback? NOTE: please refer to the Audience Feedback blog as I will be referring to it.

I learnt a few things from our audience feedback. The first piece of feedback was that he enjoyed the originality of it but we went over the top with the lights. I would agree that we may have gone a bit over board with the lights in every shot. What I would have maybe liked was a better light to use to give a better fill effect so that we wouldn't need to use the lights nearly had much, so that's one thing I would have improved. Another person said that the keyboard solo with all the lights spinning everywhere was confusing. Although this person may not have like that, our aim was to actually create that very feeling. It was meant to be confusing because it was part of the narrative that it was the end of the dream world and it ended on a cliff hanger, so what I learnt from that small negative feedback was actually positive to us. The last comment which I will take into account was that I as the actor didn't look enough like that puppet. What I have learnt is that we should have spent more time making me look more like the puppet. How exactly we could have achieved this, we would have had to gone into some research to achieve this I believe.

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

For our technologies, we used a range of different technologies to construct our research. The obvious one is the internet. With Web 2.0 it is one of the best ways to devise research into every aspect of anything. So finding research on Daft Punk and other bands and media products was a breeze. For planning such things as the stop motion, we used an app on an iPod Touch called FXR by Joby, we could test different stop motion techniques and calculate what frame rates we wanted to use and how much time it would take. For researching other music video, we used Youtube. With Youtube, we were able to compare, research and take ideas from all videos. To blog different songs and share audio, I used an audio sharing software called DivShare. It works in the same way a Digital Cloud works. I upload the song I want to share on to DivShare and then you use a share code that they give you to embed it into the blog HTML. One of our most favourite ways to show research was the Prezi application. We used it to put all our research into one presentation but present it in a very interactive way to make it interesting to look at. But also, there is the option to stop the presentation from moving and move around the presentation yourself. To help plan, I created two video blogs. This was another interactive way to show the plan of lighting and costume as I could actually present it feature and discuss it at the same time. Finally the two most basic ways, I uploaded photos to the blog to show what it was I was talking about and also I used this blog to present research, plans and to keep a journal on the progress we were making.

Conclusion 

In conclusion of this Media Production of a Music Video, I am extremely pleased with the outcome we got. After spending weeks on filming and editing and months on research, our video turned out almost exactly how we wanted it to be. We did make a few changes on the way so the original idea was in fact different from the final outcome, but most things do through trial and error. I honestly can not say what I would change if I was to do it again, what I wish we did though however was finish everything more early and maybe use a better quality camera to make it look sharper so the video wasn't ruined by the quality.

The final Production ~ Luke Leadbetter

Here is our final production all done and dusted! (Ater 5 hours of uploading to YouTube!)

Ancillery Task - Digipak CD ~ Luke Leadbetter

Below is an image of the CD art to be included in the digipak.



The design is simple, keeping tot he themes and conventions of the rest of the digipak and advert. Also, due to lack of available software this had to be made using a creative solution of Microsoft Word and MS Paint.

Ancillary Task - Magazine Advert ~ William Dixon

This is our Magazine advert

We heavily inspired it from Daft Punk's "Human After All" advert. I used the 'RusselSquare' font at it looked very digital and it's very similar to the font of a retro computer. This fits with the retro style and to have it in the lime green colour is very similar to a retro computer also. I mentioned that the single will be available to download as we are in a very digital society today so to say it's available to download is now the norm. I added the two logos at the bottom, Virgin and the Daft Punk logo as this is the same as the actual Daft Punk poster. This is probably for legal reasons as Virgin is Daft Punk's record label. The colour of the background was simply copied from an embedded colour in the album cover, this simply kept the background similar to the album cover. Finally the album cover, designed by Jess, was put on there to promote the actual album itself and it was completely necessary to have that on the poster so people know what we are promoting.

Final Digipak ~ Jess Hitch

This is our final digipak which includes a front cover, back cover and a folded insert.
Since Daft Punk is a very electronic group, we decided to use cold colours like blues and green on a black background. We also followed the general rule that Daft Punk follow with their album covers by just including the logo rather than an actual image of the band themselves.
The Commodore 64 on the front cover adds a retro feel to the cover whilst the blue lights add a much more futuristic touch. We decided on the commodore because the Daft Punk album 'Human after all' depicts the logo on the screen of a retro televison, so we decided it was appropriate to follow suit rather than use modern day technology. The font on the front is called 'Game over', another feature I thought would be appropriate seeing as the song is called digital love and a games console is pictured on the front. I decided to use a gradiented colour for the album title as it stood out more and helped pick out the blues and green in the background a bit better. It has a blue glow around it so that it appears as if it has come out of the virtual world of the computer and into ours.
The inserts are screenshots of games played on the commodore and I have replaced the original pixel characters with the Daft Punk characters instead, this is because we wanted to keep a certain theme to the inserts but make it personal to Daft Punk. The folded out insert corresponds more to the front and the back of the pack as it has the lyrics to the song on it. I thought this should suit the back more because it will be seen in between the two images of the games, so it is mostly to add a bit of variation but to also tie in the back cover with the inserts so it didn't look out of place. I used square brushes to achieve a glowing pixel effect and added a blue glow around the lyrics (which are also in 'game over') to make it look more futuristic.
The spine is simple with just a black background and blue and white 'game over' font for the album name and the artist name. The back cover continues the glowy futuristic theme from the insert and the front by using flowing, glowing brushes and floating squares to achieve a pixelled design. The back cover also includes the barcode and the record company as it will be sold in stores. The list of the songs on the back is written in the same font as the rest of the pack for continuity and it is also glowing to match the background.
Daft Punk's metanarrative is usually a serious group that make futuristic sounding music  from retro and outdated technology. We replicated this in our digipak by mixing retro and futuristic elements together until we achieved the final product.

- Jess Hitch

Audience Feedback to our Video ~ Luke Leadbetter

Here's some quotes of what's been said about our music video:

"The part I liked most was when it fades out at the end and he wakes up with goggles and shows his virtual experience with digital love, the part I didn't like was the room starting to spin as it in my opinion was a bit OTT"

"I liked the originality of the idea. I disliked the last minute as the lights were confusing. The end of the movie is good as it is emotional"

"I liked the puppet, it added humour. I liked the moving toys because it's original"

"Has a good storyline and you feel connected to the character. Effective use of lighting and camera positioning. Finally very enjoyable to watch and humorous"

"Really good storyline, very original. Good stop motion - really liked the bit with the lamp. Very effective lighting. Looks very professional"

"the fade outs could be shortened"

"A good narrative and concept, especially the way the set is kept to the one room. There could be more clarity and the human actor could look a bit more like the puppet"

Sound Effects ~ William Dixon

For the end of our Music Video, we had a scene where it was morning and it was the character waking up from his "dream". To create a better atmosphere I thought I'd add some sound effects. In the summer, I did work experience in London with a professional sound company, and one of the tips a sound effects editor told me is, "add lots of layered sounds, the more sounds, the more of story you create". So for my "story" I wanted to create the idea of there was a city outside. So I added in GarageBand the sound effect of cars driving by, a plan going overhead, police sirens and birds to give a fuller sound and to establish that it's morning. I then imported it into our Final Cut file and added the fade ins and fade outs relevant.

To play the sound effects, click play on the media player below:

Final Evaluation ~ Jess Hitch

In some ways, our music video both conforms to and challenges against the conventions of other media products. Electronic music is commonly associated with cold colours and technology, features which we have used in abundance in our videos by using blue and green lighting and including technological products such as ipods, laptops and mobile phones. By adding a quirky, comical atmosphere using a puppet as our main actor and having moving figures, we have broken away from the traditionally serious themes surrounding Daft Punk's videos and electronic genre videos in general. We have included some intertextual features in our video which is a similar style to Daft Punk's videos by including Deadmau5 figurines, another electronic artist, alongside the Daft Punk figures to represent the 'happy family' that electronic music is. By including Deadmau5 in our video we are also widening our target audience to a consumer slightly older and more into live DJ electronic music. Also, due to the fact that both Deadmau5 and Daft Punk choose not to reveal their identities, we thought it was fitting to have them both together. Our use of a puppet instead of a real actor was a good choice as it add to the comic effect and it also made acting easier, as a puppet has very few facial features that can be easily manipulated with a flick of the write (literally). It also, surprisingly, conforms to Daft Punk's other videos (for example, 'Technologic') as they too used puppets and robots and tended to stay away from real actors (when they did use real actors, they weren't singing).

Our digipak and our magazine advert we tried to keep in style with existing albums and adverts by analysing the originals closely and picking out elements we could use, for example the logo on a screen, the retro laptop and the cold colours are all elements that correspond to existing Daft Punk products. Like all adverts, the cover from the digipak was used on the front, this is so that the consumer already knows the image of the album they wish to buy so they can recognize it in the shops. We decided to alter the colours of the text to a yellow-green, this is so that the information stands out more on the advert which will attract the attention of the consumer. The colour of the background on our advert is continued on from the image of the cover see at the top. We decided to use the bordered style of advert as they are mostly reserved for non-mainstream bands, it also looks more retro and ties in with the retro laptop at the top.

We are all very proud of our final products and our consumer feedback shows us that they enjoyed it as well. We think that all of the elements we used were effective but we could have managed our time a bit better. Having counted up the amount of hours spent filming, we concluded that the filming only too about 24 hours. Had we been better prepared, we could have had our filming done a long time ago instead of all this hassle with timings. It would also mean we could have spent more time in designing the digipak and making our images for it. Due to the fact that we were quickly running out of time, we couldn't make our own imaged as orginally planned and we instead ended up using images from google to outline what we wanted. I think that the Digipak could have looked much better (especially the inserts) if we had time to create our own images. I think perhaps the font used on the magazine advert could also have been in 'game over' so that it actually matches the digipak cover. Other than the fact that we could perhaps have managed our time a little better and actually stuck to the timetable we had first set out, I'm very pleased with the final product and it does look quite professional with all the interesting editing and the amazing video effects. I think we have achieved what we set out to do, to create a drug-fueled fantasy video in which the impossible becomes possible and the strange becomes wonderful.

- Jess Hitch

Diary of Editing - Day 9 (Final) ~ William Dixon

Luke started editing early today, he started by adding the end sequence when it is morning and added the fade outs at the end. Earlier I created a sound effects audio file (see sound effects blog post for more details) me and Luke added that to the end to create the realisation of normality. We also added in the final stop motion clips. Once we were sure we finished, we watched through form beginning to end as many times as possible looking for any errors. We found one timing error and we opened up in Final Cut and edited that part to make it correct. After we exported it in a quicktime movie. We had finished.

Diary of editing - Day 8 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today was to be frank, pretty awesome. Will and myself got a lot done during the lesson, and then also after school. During the lessonwe continued to insert clips and make subclips from the original sequences, and also finding new effects. We stumbled upon an effect called 'bloom', which really gives the disco lighting in the shots that bit more of a kick, and making the lights on the piano look really effective. At the end of the lesson, Will left with the promise of coming back. I continued to edit for an hour, filling in large gaps and creating some of the more complex scenes, such as a scene near the end where a spinning shot must be continually looped. When Will did, as by his word, return an hour later, we added cool looking effects and blurred the whole thing to soften the edges and remove some of the noise that came with filming with a not-so-great camera. We continued to power on through the editing, capturing, placing and editing clips for another two hours, until we were eventually thrown out at six 'o' clock by the caretaker. So overall a good time spent editing, with a lot done, hopefully we'll be done very soon!

Diary of Filming - Day 6 "Final Day" ~ William Dixon

Today we aimed to get all the filming done. We achieved this with much relief. Luke and I filmed the final scene of the video at 2pm when it was light enough for the shots to make it seem like morning. We did these shot's in 1-2 takes so it didn't take long at all considering it was only 4 shots all together. In the evening me and Luke filmed the rest. We got the storyboard, went over each page one by one checking to see if we had any gaps and when there was one, we went and filmed it. We kept this up until eventually there was nothing else to film. So we packed everything up and left my house about 8pm. A very satisfying film as it was our last, it was more of a relief though if anything.

Radical Changes to the Storyboard ~ Luke Leadbetter

Throughout filming we have had to make several changes to the storyboard of our production. a lot of the stop motion sequences have been cut out and replaced with new solutions, due to lack of time, manpower and equipment. Other shots have also been edited, but majority of them have not been to a great extent.  The replacement shots seem to fit in well, and in some places look better than what we had planned anyway!

Diary of Filming - Day 5 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today we decided to start a bit earlier. Arriving at Will's at 5, myself and Will immediately set about filming more shots, completing two pages of the storyboard. Jess turned up soon after and we continued to do stop motion shots until she left. The stop motion went well and majority without hiccups. After completing all the shots we could think of that we hadn't done for stop motion, Jess left, leaving myself and Will with another 3 hours to get as much as we could done. With Will's stomach full of margarita pizza, we were raring to go and really were surprised about how much we squeezed in, nearly filling the tape (We had 7 minutes left!) Overall it was a very successful nights filming, what we did achieve was to - what we think - a good standard.

Digipak insert - Ideas ~ Jess Hitch

Since we used an image of the 'Commodore 64' laptop on our cover, we thought about designing the inserts around that theme too. So we found a game called 'Chuckie egg' for that platform and took a screenshot, we're then going to alter the screenshot to include little pixel daft punks instead to make it personal to the album. I'm going to design the pixels on a program I have called 'Pixen' which is specially designed for pixel art and is very easy to use. We are going to do the same with other game screenshots from the commodore and add in funny little pixel daft punks and intertextual references to their other videos to fill up the extra inserts.

Due to some issues with photoshop crashing all the time, I couldn't tweak the front cover to my liking so some of the edges are a little bit rough, however, once scaled down, you can hardly notice it at all. Our teacher reminded us that we also had to do the spine for the digipak also so that's a little more work I have to do this evening before our new deadline of tomorrow, as we're not in school on deadline day.

On top of finishing the digipak, I have to write up the evaluation for the blog as well! Looks like it's going to be a late night...

- Jess Hitch

Reflections from Editing ~ Luke Leadbetter

From all of the editing we've accomplished so far, it has become clear that we don't have enough time to make all of the clips we drew in  our storyboard. Instead we are going to, as well as getting new clips, repeat some of the other clips, just flopped and rearranged. By taking advantage of the 'electronic loop' style of music, we can do this with a good outcome, not damaging the meta-narrative or any other aspect of our production.

Diary of Editing - Day 7 ~ William Dixon

Today we put the first two shots of the stop motion on. What we didn't realise was that the stop motion clips were not widescreen, but Jess managed to zoom in and that corrected it, but also it didn't ruin the shot. As it became clear that we didn't have much time left for filming brand new shots all the time, I decided to "reuse" some shots but in a way to fit the narrative. I repeated the clips but to the beat of the song so it created a loop effect, like DJ's use. With another shot, where the puppet turns towards the camera, I used an effect called flop which mirrors the shots. This created a turn around effect which when looped and in time with the music, looked very effective.

Diary of Filming - Day 4 ~ Luke Leadbetter

In our latest filming venture, Jess and myself managed to squeeze in a couple more hours of work. However, due to lack of preparation of software we wasted about 40 minutes of this. Once we had software set up however, we dived straight into filming some stop motion shots. Due to time restrictions, we only managed to get 2 of them done,  much to our own dislike.

Editing Blog - Day 6 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today Will decided to change the timings of a guitar strum sequence, this was quite time consuming due to the faffy nature of the clips. As well as this, we decided to recycle a couple of clips, for example, a shot of the puppet's hands changing fret on the guitar. For this shot however, we realised that if we reverse the timing, we could achieve what looked like a new shot, but without filming one.

Editing Blog - Day 5 ~ Luke Leadbetter

We have more footage! After 2 hours more filming on Sunday, we have some new shots!
So today we captured the new footage into Final Cut, cutting it and creating sub-clips as appropriate. Once this was done, I started to place the clips into the timeline, with advice and help from Will as to their timing and length. At the end of the lesson Will had to leave for another lesson, but luckily I had a free, leaving me for another hour to continue editing the lighting, position and timing. Will came back when he could, and we both agreed it was going well and what we would edit next lesson.

Editing Blog - Day 4 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today we continued to edit the lighting, colour and timing of our captured shots. Through lots of tweaking I believe the overall quality of the shots are slowly improving. unfortunately, due to a lack of new footage, that was all we could manage for today, but we're all very happy with what we've accomplished so far.

Diary of Filming - Day 3 ~ William Dixon

This day, we went to my house to film for a few hours. We actually got quite a bit done in the space of two hours. We redid some shots that we noticed didn't look good in the editing process, we also managed to do some new shots, including one shot which we were concerned with which involved panning around the puppet and keyboard and then the laptop and puppet. This shot actually turned out fine. We also started the shots with the puppet and guitar. Finally we got all but one shot that we needed finish during the first 20 seconds of the video which was the panning of the props and setting creating the establishing shots. All in all, a good day of filming.

Lighting ~ William Dixon

Press play to view the Video Blog

Here is some photo's of the lighting we used

Costume ~ William Dixon

Press play on the video clip below to see our Video Blog

Here's some photo's of the costume

Magazine Advert Analysis ~ Luke Leadbetter

Advert Analysis on Prezi

Overall, the importance of Daft Punk's anonymity is vital in our production.

Diary Of Editing - Day 3 ~ William Dixon

Yesterday we managed to get all the clips from our last filming on to Final Cut Express. During this time, we learned what clips we need to redo and what ones we can keep.
One of the shots we were worried about was when all the disco lights come on because we weren't sure it would look good on camera. Turns out that the shots looked great without any need of editing and we don't need to worry about adding any extra lighting. The only shots we didn't get done this day was the typing on the keyboard shots as we didn't have enough time to play around with the speeds of the shot, so we will continue to work on that during the next editing session.

Diary of Editing -Day 2 ~ William Dixon

This day, we cut up what we had filmed the day before into subclips. We also managed to get some of the clips into Final Cut and edit them up. During this we came across 2 problems. The first problem was that the tripod we used when filming was really unreliable. Basically, when we wanted to use it for panning, it was too loose to do a slow pan and when we tightened it, it was too stiff to do a smooth shot. So when it came to editing, most of the pan shots we couldn’t use because they were too wobbly. Second problem, was that we didn’t realise that when you add a new clip into Final Cut, it pushes all the other clips along, so all our synced clips so far had moved.

Although both the problems are annoying, we will take these as lessons. We now have devised a technique on adding the clips without pushing the clips. And also, we now know not the use that tripod in the filming as it’s unreliable.

Diary of Filming - Day 2 ~ Luke Leadbetter

On our second day of filming we all converged upon Will's house at 5pm. After making sure the set was exactly as it was the last time we filmed we started straight away to film the shots we missed last time, due to lack of props. This time we remembered to bring Will's electric guitar and a desk lamp, allowing us to do a pan across the guitar and the desk. We filmed a few shots before Jess had to leave at 8, leaving myself and Will to continue filming until we decided we'd done enough for the night at 9. Will and myself managed to a large amount of shots, surprising ourselves with how much we got done. We discovered more difficulties with hiding the puppeteer in several shots, but we managed to overcome this with large quantities of small cramped spaces and pain. Overall it was a very successful session and I now very much look forward to editing our clips in our next lesson.

Editing Diary - Day 2 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today we continued editing from clips captured last lesson. Due to the fact we haven't had an opportunity to film since our last editing session, there was no new clips to insert. This gave myself and Will the opportunity to further fine tune the editing of our previously inserted clips. Next lesson we hope to have many more clips to insert so we can start filling in the gaps and adding more to the video.

Lip Syncing ~ William Dixon

Throughout our video, there is lip syncing with the lyrics with the song. Although, because we are doing it with a puppet, it's quite difficult (much to our surprise) to get the lip sync accurate all the time. We thought at first that this would be a problem, but through research with other Music Videos featuring puppets, we realised that it's not all that important to get the lip sync 100% accurate.

Take the Music Video, Ass Like That by Eminem. You can clearly see that the lyrics are not always in sync, though they are always accurate enough to make it clear that that's what the puppet is singing. Same with the videos, Life In Technicolor ii by Coldplay and Land Of Confusion by Genesis. All these videos have the same features where the lip sync is always very close but not always 100%. Why this is, I think, is because it just adds to the humour of them using a puppet. Puppets are, at the end of a day, a toy that is built for Fun. So having these tiny mistakes, adds to the fun.

So what we will take from this research is that we should try our absolute best to get the sync right, but if it does happen to be a little bit off, then it'll just add to the humour and fun side to our Music Video.


To watch the Music Videos a referenced above, copy and paste the following Links into your URL

For Genesis' - Land Of Confusion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlBIa8z_Mts&ob=av2n

For Coldplay's - Life In Technicolor ii
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXSovfzyx28

For Eminem's - Ass Like That
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yf15kikC_g

Analysis of a magazine advert ~ Jess Hitch

Magazine adverts on Prezi

- Jess Hitch

Diary of Editing - Day 1 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today Will and myself captured the clips from filming onto Final Cut Express. I then proceeded to cut the reel into seperate sub-clips, giving each appropriate names. This process was fiddly and irritating, trying to find the best take of a particular shot and then cutting it in the most suitable place. Once this had been accomplished, Will then changed the file type of the edited song (Due to Final Cut Expresses's inability to use M4A format) before placing it into Final Cut. I then positioned the clips into the timeline, applying suitable editing to the brightness and contrast of the clips, with feedback from Will. It was quite difficult to align the clips with song correctly, to create a smooth lip sync, but once this was accomplished the results were extremely satisfying. Through this section of the editing process we have realised that we need to re-do a few of the shots, and be much more aware of mise-en-scene and framing.

Owl City Digipak ~ Jess Hitch

Digipak - owl city on Prezi

Metanarrative: From this digipak, we can see that the artist, whose face we cannot see on the cover, feels as though he is living in a strange fantasy world which is not that different from our own but contains some obvious differences. The contrast between nature and technology suggests that those two things living in harmony is a normal occurrence. The fact that we cannot see the artist anywhere on the exterior of the digipak suggests that he doesn't want to reveal his identity to people easily and that he is mysterious and hidden. - Jess Hitch

Diary of Filming - Day 1 ~ Jess Hitch

Last night we filmed the first few shots of our music video. It was fun setting up the room to how we wanted it and the coloured lights which Luke borrowed from church looked very cool in the dark, almost exactly how we imagined it whilst we were story-boarding.
Before we started, we made a mini-vlog just giving a tour of our setting for the blog and also a mini-vlog for the lighting, they'll be uploaded as soon as we've edited the first part of our filming.

We started at around 6 when the sun was down so that none of the light ruined our setting which worked out well, however, it did mean that we didn't have a lot of time to film before I had to go home. Luckily, they boys stayed behind for a few more hours after I'd left and got a few more shots done.
It was fun filming with the puppet because as soon as we saw it for the first time, we knew that we'd made a good decision about choosing to use that instead of filming the performance aspects with a real actor.

Today we decided that instead of doing all the filming at once, we were going to film a bit, then edit it when we're not filming to save more time. This should make things work more efficiency because some of us can be working on the filming while the other films. It also works out well because I can also do some editing at home as I also have Final cut Express. So today we're editing some of the shots that were usable since most of the shots were just to get an idea as to where and how were were going to go about shooting some of the more awkward positions (ie. trying to hide the puppeteer behind the bed whilst still having enough room to move the puppet naturally.)

So having watched what we filmed back on the computer, we realized that we would have to re-film a few of the shots due to minor issues with framing and lighting but that shouldn't take too long as now we know what to do to make our shots better.

- Jess Hitch

Diary of Filming - Day 0 ~Jess Hitch

Today we'll be filming after school at Will's house. It will be about sundown so around 4 o' clock when we start filming, this is to make sure that we keep to the fact that our main character has woken up at night so filming in the day with the sun streaming through the windows was out of the question.

We have decided to leave the stop-motion elements until last so that we have an idea how the live elements will interact with them and also to see if we can recreate the stop-motion away from the set and thus saving more time.

We've made a list of all the things each of us needs to bring to decorate the set. I'm bringing:

• Coloured disco ball
• Fishing wire
• ipod
• torches
• Cellofane - for creating coloured light 

The camera will be booked and we'll be ready to go at sundown!

We're all looking forward to it.

- Jess Hitch

Story boarding ~Jess Hitch

We started our story boarding a few weeks back and although we're 5 days behind schedule, we're making good progress. We've been playing through the song and imagining exactly how we would want it to look. At the moment, it's still very rough so that we can get it finished quickly and start our filming as soon as possible. Once we have started our filming and are making progress, we can go back to our story board and make it more presentable for the blog. I've done majority of the drawing within the story board with 90% of ideas coming from the guys. At the moment, we only have about 1 minute left to story board which shouldn't take too long as there are no more lyrics from this point onwards which allows a little more room for creativity as we can be as abstract as we like without contradicting any lyrics.

Due to the fact that we've had to cut the song down, we've had to run the story board against our edited version so that we don't extend parts that have already been cut but this wasn't really a problem as we had the edited song on itunes to play against our story board. We've discussed chopping the video down by a further 8 seconds however, we decided against it because we didn't have the time and we'd already story boarded past the point that we wanted to cut which would affect all of the frames past that point.

The good thing about using stop-motion frames is that we can each do some stop-motion at home with free software and we won't have to do it all on set, so it'll take a lot less time since we won't be wasting filming time at our location which will be used to film all of the live-action shots. Of course any stop motion that requires a particular background will have to be done on set as the audience will get confused as to why our stop motion elements have been moved out of the room.

We've already taken mise-en-scene into consideration at this point as its important we set the room up correctly to match the meaning we are trying to portray. We are going to decorate our location with coloured lights and Daft Punk and other electronica band posters on the walls, this is to represent bright, cold technology and show intertextuality between Deadmau5 and Daft Punk. We're also including Luke's Daft Punk and Will's Deadmau5 figurines to further the intertextuality in the video.

Luke and Will have also been discussing what kind of effects we wanted to add into a our shots by toying with the transitions and effects on Final Cut Express and we've found some interesting effects that will further present our theme of drug-fueled fantasies and vivid dreams which include interesting colouring effects and wavy transitions, when put together, it can enhance the atmosphere of our video.

- Jess Hitch

Edited by Luke Leadbetter-

Here's a slideshare of the storyboard:

Story board

View more presentations from lukeybo.

Censorship ~ William Dixon

Censorship is when a part of a song or video gets filtered out to cover up anything inappropriate. This can either be something visual or audio. To cover up audio, you can have either a “beeb” sound over the top of the sound or mute the sound out completely. Also, if it is a word such as a swear word, you can simply change the word completely into something with a similar meaning. For example, In James Blunt’s song “Your Beautiful” in one version a lyric in the song is “you can see from my face that I was, f**king high…” and in the censored version it’s “you can see from my face that I was, flying high”. In video, you can either: blur out something, put a black box over it, or cut out the clip completely.

With songs and music videos, there will sometimes be two versions of the song/video. One version which they will only be allowed to play after 9:00pm on live T.V/Radio which will be the uncensored version and then the censored version which they will can play anytime as it’s appropriate for all audiences. An example of a music video which does this is Chase and Status’ “Pieces” Featuring Plan B. And a song with two versions, which I mentioned earlier, James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”

Here is a link to the uncensored version of “Pieces”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJreihOW3ZA

Here is a link to the censored version of “Pieces”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MJspL232c8&noredirect=1

You can play “You’re Beautiful” the uncensored version below by clicking play



And you play “You’re Beautiful” censored below by clicking play



With our music video, we don't plan to have any inappropriate content that will need to be censored so with regards to our Music Video, we won't be needing to censor out anything.

Digipak Analysis ~ William Dixon

Digipak: Linkin Park's A Thousand Suns on Prezi

Digipak - Hugh Laurie - Let Them Talk ~ Luke Leadbetter

Digipak - Hugh Laurie's Let Them Talk on Prezi

This sound clip is myself talking about what this digipak has made me think about in relation to our own.

Using Photos in Prezi ~ William Dixon

Prezi ~ Luke Leadbetter

This is just a demonstration of software we will use to present our ideas and planning.

Test on Prezi

Questionnaire ~ Jess Hitch

Questionnaire

1-    What electronic communications devices do you have at home?

-       Television

-       Mp3 player

-       Desktop/laptop Computer

-       Mobile phone

-       Landline phone

-       Router

-       Tablet computer

-       E-reader

-       USB accessories

2-    How often do you watch music channels such as VIVA and MTV?

-       Never

-       Rarely

-       Occasionally

-       Often

-       Very often

3-    Do you prefer music videos with a modern/futuristic theme or a retro/old-school theme?

-       Futuristic

-       Modern

4-    Are you more likely to watch music videos online or on TV?

-       Online

-       On TV

5-    Which of these items would you have in your room if you could?

-       Fairy lights

-       Lanterns

-       UV paint

-       Glow in the dark stars/planets/aliens

-       Hanging objects such as planes, spaceships and helicopters.

6-    How plain are the walls in your bedroom?

-       They’re a plain colour and have nothing on them.

-       They’re a bright colour with nothing on them.

-       They’re a plain colour with posters and shelves on them.

-       They’re a bright colour with posters and shelves on them.

7-    Do you have a desk in your bedroom?

-Yes

-No

8-    Do you have a single bed or a double bed?

-       Single

-       Double

9-    Do you prefer music videos set in exotic places or closer to home?

-       Exotic places

-       Close to home

This questionnaire will tell us how we can better relate to our target audience in our video and what their interests are regarding technology and music. It will also help us to create an image of what our target audience's bedroom looks like so we can recreate that as our setting in the video.

Graphs to show the results of this information will be created in my next blog.

       

Shortened Song ~ William Dixon

For our music video, we have made the decision to shorten the song from 4:58 to 3:58. We have done this by putting the song into Garage Band and cutting down the Loops and then finally adding a shorter Fade Out at the end which in total shortened the song by a minute. We did this because we felt that if the song was shorter we could keep the video more interesting in a shorter space of time. Also, this is quite a common thing for artists to do, for the same reason. Here is a list of songs that have done this: Bon Jovi’s Dry Country, Owl City’s Fireflies, Slipknot’s Before I Forget, Pendulum’s Watercolour and even Daft Punk’s Around the World.

Here's the original song, click play to hear it

And now, here's the new shortened version, click play to hear it

Potential Songs ~ Jess Hitch

Potential songs

Song title	Artist/band	Opinion: Luke	Opinion: Jess	Opinion: Will
Teardrop	Massive attack	Luke liked this song “because it would have made a good abstract video.”	I didn’t like this so much because it was already used in a TV drama. I also thought it was too slow-paced and a bit boring.	Will thought it was all right but he thought it was a bit slow paced.
British mode	Goose	Luke liked this one because they haven’t had many videos made.	I thought the intro was too slow and I also just didn’t like the singer in general. It also already had a video for this particular song.	Will thought it was shallow and pedantic.”
Galaxies	Owl city	Luke thought it was great because it would have made a good, upbeat video.	I really liked this song because its really upbeat and I’m a big fan of Owl city. It would have been ideal too because it doesn’t already have a video made.	Will loved this because it was really upbeat and probably would have made a good video.
Picking up the pieces	Blue October	Luke liked this video because it’s different from many songs and could have made a unique video.	I really didn’t like this video because it was too depressing and I just didn’t like the band in general.	Will didn’t like this because it was too boring and depressing.
Television rules the nation	Daft punk	Luke thought that this would be a good song to choose because it fits in with the genre we were aiming for and would have made a good abstract video.	I didn’t like the lyrics at the start of this song and I also thought it was a little bit boring.	Will liked the upbeatness of the video and he liked how it fit in with the electronic genre.
Tommy Gun	Royal republic	I showed this video to Luke a while back and he thinks the song is great. We wanted to do this song for our preliminary but it was too simple and we thought we could do a more interesting and complex video for this song.	I loved this song, it’s really upbeat and the singer is really good. I thought the original video could have used improving and we thought about taking this song forward to our final task but it wasn’t really the genre we had in mind.	Will really liked the song too but again, it wasn’t electronica. We had a fairly fixed idea as to the kind of song we wanted for our final video.
Digital Love	Daft punk	Luke loved this song because he thinks it’s really great and really modern. It also doesn’t have a video so it would be really great if we could come up with a technological themed video to tie in with the title.	I really liked this song because it’s cute and upbeat and still fits in with the genre we had in mind. I also agreed with Luke about the theme for this song.	Will liked this song because it features lyrics and has a narrative that we can play around with.

Our final decision on song choice for our music video was Digital Love by Daft Punk. All of us were fans of Daft punk and we all really like their music and we thought that because the song is called ‘digital love’, we could create a narrative that revolved around the digital and romance themes. The digital being a common occurrence in Daft Punk’s songs but romance lacking so we decided to include that into the video. We loved how this was the kind of genre and sound that we had in mind, which makes it easier on us because all the ideas we had in our head can be placed into the video with fairly little tweaking.