Evaulation Question 4

Blogger
Blogger played the biggest part in our work as we used it to showcase and present all of our work from the outset of the year and throughout, its an easy and simple way of displaying our work digitally for free. In a post we could add videos to give examples and mp3 players along with other types of media to help us get our points across.
Here you can see the blogger homepage with all the posts from this years coursework

The layout of the website is easy to navigate and allows post to be made quickly and efficiently, its easy to find older posts and to go back and correct or change then simply.

Here you can see one of my previous posts with a youtube video embedded into the post, this is done by clicking on the clapper board logo in the toolbar bellow, and then searching for the video you wish to embed into the post, In this toolbar you can change the font along with the sizing, style you can also add in photos and edit the text.

Blogger allows easy navigation of posts by adding in labels to each and every post, this is done by adding in a label in the toolbar to the side of the text, this will then be shown on the right hand side of your blogs homepage.

Glogter
Glogster is another online tool that i used to help me showcase my work, its a simple effective blogging tool that allows you to make a interactive pin up board to embed into your own blog, like blogger its simple and easy to navigate and fully customisable in terms of layout, colour and add ons.
I used Glogster for one of my evaluation question to help make it digitally interactive to the user, i added in pictures and examples from my work and then the final video also from my work. This helps portray the work i have done and makes it look better rather than a standard block of text.
The first thing is to choose a base design for the layout of the glog, but this can be fully customised at a later date, then simply add in text to the glog and videos/pictures to make it more interactive for the user.

 Here are the different types of graphics that can be aded into the glog, there simple effective tools that help enhance the look and feel of it to make it more interactive to the user.








These are the different photos that i aded into the glog, its a simple quick and easy process, just choose a photo form your desktop and click upload.

Evaluation Question 1

For our ancillary task, we went ahead and did research into previous bands and how they created their digipack and magazine cover to give us ideas on how we would cross promote the digipack and magazine advert and how we could tie them in with each other.

Initially we decided that the cover for the album would be a shot taken from the video; using one of the scenes for example we chose to use the car initially on the album cover but we later decided through our research that the album digipack are never directly linked to back to the video of one of the singles on the album, that would more to do with a single release rather than an album. So to create our digipack we chose to create the cover around the album name and try and relate it as much as possible to what we thought the album name 'Passive Me Agressive You' could mean. To start with we decided on two contrasting things to resemble the name, our ideas were widely ranged and outrageous but we finally settled on an idea that was slightly cliche but fitted nicely with our ideas.
Dropping food colouring into a glass of water was what we experimented with using different colours ect. to try and get different effects and the outcome was quite professional. All of the panels of the digipack were from the same shoot which were rather professional shots, from there on we decided to make the magazine advert.

From our reasearch we found that the majority of magazine adverts present the album cover on the whole page, with the same font and same construction keeping to a strict house style which is what we wanted to accomplish, so we chose to do exactly that. We took the photo from the album cover and blew it up over the page and added the text with realistic download links etc to add to the legitimacy.
The main thing we found was that successful promotion comes down to the house style and brand identity.

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 3 by domlake1994 on GoAnimate

Video Maker - Powered by GoAnimate.

The main thing that we 

found out from the audience feedback was that the large majority of the performance clips didn’t look like the were synced properly, for example the shots of the keyboard player were highly out of time, due to the fact he didn’t know how to play the keyboard which is poor planning from us, other shots like that of the bass drum looked out of time to the music which is an easy fix providing the actually shot is in time with the music.

Another shot that was completely out of time was the guitarist, the actual shot was synced up to the piano playing which was all well and good but it just didn’t sound right at all.

From the feedback we also learnt that everyone like the steel wool photography shoot clips. ‘Like the fireworks’ was the general consensus when it came to the clip, it wasn’t a planned shot but it seemed that it was a good idea to put it in and it was. Other shots that group seemed to like were the bmxing and skating footage, in my opinion this could be due to the extreme nature of the sports and the sports aren’t really shown and broadcasted that much.

With the ancillary task we produced a first draft of digi pack and got some feedback on it, generally the feedback we received showed us that each panel of the digipack was more suited for it to be a single rathe than and album pack, the first draft had specific features on the panels that related solely to the video that we had created. We went away and created a totally new pack using completely new images that relate to the album name only, looking at other album trying to get inspiration.

Matt made a questionnaire for various different logos for the front of the album to try and help us decide which is best for the album cover.

Through the glass effect

By Matt
We got this idea from the Clavin Harris music video "Feel so Close". We shot this particular shot from a number of different angles. However half way through i thought of the idea that what if the camera was t appear to go through the glass window of the passenger side on the car. I didn't exactly know how it would work but decided to have a played around. 

If the window was removed in the actual footage it would allow us to have a steadi camera path and then i could then just add this back in post production. Therefore we rolled the window down and manually focussed in the final position. Then with my hands just guided the camera slowly and steadily through the window into the camera to bring Doms hand on the radio into focus. 

 









Once we had the original footage i then had the task of editing it. Unfortunately watching it back i realised that all through i was trying my hardest to keep it as steady as possible there was still a reasonable amount of camera shake. Therefore i imported the footage into after effects and brought up the tracking window (images above). 

I then selected one part of the frame that stays in the shot throughout the composition (gear stick) to track the movements over time. This shows me the direction of the footage movement and any severe shakes will show in the tracking movements as there wont be a straight line. I then restricted the movement of the footage to allow for a steady flow as if the camera was gliding through the window. This produced the video below, as you can see there is a massive difference between the two shots (below). 


Once we had the original footage i then had the task of editing it. Unfortunately watching it back i realised that all through i was trying my hardest to keep it as steady as possible there was still a reasonable amount of camera shake. Therefore i imported the footage into after effects and brought up the tracking window (images above).

I then selected one part of the frame that stays in the shot throughout the composition (gear stick) to track the movements over time. This shows me the direction of the footage movement and any severe shakes will show in the tracking movements as there wont be a straight line. I then restricted the movement of the footage to allow for a steady flow as if the camera was gliding through the window. This produced the video below, as you can see there is a massive difference between the two shots (below).

Once this i had been done i began the task of adding in the window which i knew would take me a while as i was trialling lots of different techniques to see which worked. The one finally found to work was using a pre composite made up of multiple layers on a mask.

Firstly i started out on the first frame where the window was "biggest" and the most of it could be seen. I then created a solid layer and used the pen tool to draw around where i would want the window to be in the shot.

I then masked out the rest of the shot so only the solid layer was visible in the shape of the window. I then precomposed this shot, which turns the shot into a folder in other words so i would have to deal with lots of layers on the original project file. 

The next thing i had to do then was actually texture the video. The first thing i added was a gradient or ramp in after effects. Looking at the small window next to it i could see that the overall tone of the windows was a pale blue and it was slightly darker at the bottom compared to the top. I then added this on a alpha matte paired to the solid layer (pen tooled window) so that gradient filled the solid layers spot. When the opacity was lowered it gave a very nice effect (seen to the below) however it was just not realistic enough.

So i thought what else would a window have, dirt? The most obvious thing that can make a massive difference is the texture to the window not just the shade and positioning. I then imported an image of a dirty texture i got off the image. I colour corrected using curves and the toner to have a more blue base so it would overlay easier. I then added it to the pre-composite and increased the contrast/exposure slightly to make it slightly more visible. I then added a mask to the top as there would usually be only dirt on the bottom side of the window from driving. Then feathered it out to make sure there was a gradual development of dirt and not a cut off line between clean and dirty making it appear more natural.

The image was getting better but there was still something missing to make it complete, a reflection. Windows reflect there background and it was essential to add one to finally finish off the texture of the window. I went on the internet and found a image of a field with trees and a nice sky. As the car windows are slightly pointed up wards i made sure it was essential for a lot of the sky to be able to be seen. I then played around with the curves again to increase the contrast but also decrease the overall tone of the image as reflections aren't known for being the brightest. Finally this created a realistic window i was very happy with.

Now i had my window i had to track it to the actual video. Unfortunately there was no way of me being able to track to whole clip and pin the solid matte to that spot and the most of the matte eventually goes out of the shot, which meant i was going to have to do it manually. I pressed the key frame button on the shape of vector, position and scale and then skipped a head and repositioned all the attributes to fit in the shot again. This took some time but it meant i could personally make sure all the frames were in shot and rightly framed.

However when it got to the point where all of the sides of the window were out of shot, it was hard to guess how much the window would increase and move to throughout the rest of the composition. Therefore i used this graph see the past rate of scale and position and then projected this path throughout the rest of the frames.

I was now into the final stages of the shot. At the end of the shot i know had to create the illusion that the camera was travelling through the glass. I travelled to that point i thought it would in relation to the surroundings of the shot and lowered the opacity using keyframes so it would gradually decrease. I then wanted to create a sort of ripple that would happen across the screen to reinforce the illusion that we were travelling through glass.

Therefore i created another pre-composite of a white strip which i feathered out and animated to move across the screen at the same point we "travel" through the glass. Then created an adjustment layer with a displacement map making sure only the horizontal displacement was applied and parented the source of the map to the animated rectangle. So when we pass through the window the displacement map bends the video across the screen quickly. Finally render is below which i am very happy with. 

Evaluation Question 2

Ancillary Task - Magazine Advert

This is final magazine advert that we have gone for.

Video Feedback

After completing our music video matt went ahead and showed it to various different social gorups in the common room during our free periods.
The feedback was generally good with some key points being made that we could do to improve the video further.
Take a look!
   

Ancillary Task - Digipack

This is the Final Digi-Pack that we settled on after a lot of talk about which one we should choose.

For the album cover we decided to go with something that is solely related to the album name and have no corelation to the video that we have made, the same goes for the magazine advert aswell.

The album name is 'Passive Me Aggressive You' so we went with two contrasting things, from dropping red food die into a glass of water and dropping yellow food dye in the water at the same time.

Singles and Album Differences

When looking at the differences between single and album covers, there is often some correlation between the two but differs from artist to artist.

The Arctic Monkeys first single was 'I bet you look good on the dancefloor' released on Domino records, the cover of the single depicts a young woman who is a 'trainee' shopkeeper of a connivence store as you can see from the badge on the apron.
You can also see that she is handling some items that you find in a convenience store accompanied by the alcohol shelves behind her and the sign also behind her stating that tobacco products cannot be sold to anyone under the age of 16 which was a law that was abolished in 2007 and changed to 18 years of age.
The video to this single has no relevance to the single cover as it is a live performance shot in a small studio to a small crowd using television cameras from the 1970's to give the video a retro look.
Some would say the photo on the cover correlates between the fact the song is talking about a woman on a night out but that isnt intentional


The album that this single featured on was 'Whatever people say i am, That's what im not'. This album has a photo of Chris Mcure on the front smoking a cigarette that was taken in the early hours of the morning in a Korova bar, Liverpool. This photo was one take in the moment with no planning, its a simple yet effective approach that somehow correlates to the band themselves, connoting an indie type scene/genre using the saturated colour look on the photo. The photo alone has absolutely no relevance to any song on the album in particular and has no intentional relevance to the style of the band.
The house style of the two albums is about as far a the correlation between the two go, the 'Arctic Monkeys' logo at a sort of 15 degree angle that is stamped on the front of both the covers.

On the front cover of Calvin Harris' 'Feel So Close' single there is a picure of a western cowboy with a white horse, that relates directly to the music video for the song where there is a narrative of the same man with his horse. Its an effective approach to the simplistic style of the genre of music, a shot taken from the production of the music video, it also makes the marketing of the video a lot easier as the general public will recognise the photo and relate it back to the video.

This is the album in which 'Feel so Close' was released on, as you can see there is the same sort of house style from the american suburbs but the album bares no relation the video from one of the songs on the album.
It shows the artist sitting on a curb in an american style street with his name and album names pictured on the wall behind him.

This is the single cover for the single Inhaler by Foals, the cover this is related soley to the video for inhaler as you can see the jacket that he is wearing on the cover is the same one that he wears in the video for inhaler, this creates a direct link between the two rendering it a single cover.
The album cover that this single is on is completely different on the other hand its a retro style photo of horses in the sea which bears no relevance to the album title at all and is not related to the songs on the album either, this shows that the main thing behind the album covers is that its down to photography rather than relating the album cover.
This is something that we should look further into to gauge how well albums relate to the album content.










  

Steel wool

As a keen photographer myself i felt that we needed something different and out of the ordinary as an album cover, id wanted to do some steel wool photography for a long time but never really had the chance so i thought that this could be the right time to do it.

When researching on how to do it, it seemed simple enough. Its the same as light painting and long exposure shots, the shutter needs to be kept open for around 10 seconds for it to work with the widest aperture and a film speed of 200iso to 400iso depending how light or dark the area the photo is being taken is.

The way in which the orb is created is done by putting a clump of steel wool in a whisk and attaching string to the whisk and you hold the other end of the string, this is all

When taking the photo i decided to drag Matt along with me to help out with the photos, the teqnique is very simple and the outcome is excellent but with two people it makes it 100x easier.

Here are some of the photos from the night.

Rough Cut

Performance Lighting

For the performance we have all decided that we are going to try the same approach that Huse Monfaradi took when filming the music video to the Arctic Monkeys video 'Brianstrom'.
In the video the whole band is silhouetted from a source of light behind the band facing the camera creating dark shadows on the band when filming, this gives a slightly illusive look to the band and makes its more interesting as i personally haven't seen it been done in a music video elsewhere.

To try and re-create this effect we chose to use flood light that I happen to have a home, these are very powerful construction lights for building with halogen bulbs that give off a yellow type light which is perfect for what we wanted.

The lights are going to be placed directly behind the band at head height to try and re create this effect , the lights should hopefully be big and bright enough to do this and have a good outcome.
I also have a bright cathode light which gives off a bright white colour that is perfect for close up shots of the band as its a neutral colour and will give a nice gradient on the actors faces when filming close ups.
When looking at any cinematography having a neutral light in dark settings is the best way to light an actors face,

Final Cut

Uploading...

After cancelling the first two uploads as they were going to take a supposed 31 hours, here is the final cut.

Animatic Me and Danny

Lenses and Techniques

As we are using DSLR's to film the music video it opens up a much wider scope for artistic flare.

There are certain things that we can use and play around with compared to the normal digital camera for example the lenses, as i am a keen photographer myself i have a few that i was able to use on my camera to film with.

The first is the standard lens that comes in the kit when purchasing a DSLR, the 18-55mm. This is a very basic lens with some wide angle at the lower end, which is perfect for the beginner and for the point and shoot as it allows easy use with a small amount of zoom to accompany it,

(insert example photos)

We used this lens for the large majority of filming as its basic and versatile, it creates what we want easily.

 it also has a very standard aperture which is F3.5, which allows you to shoot in low light as it lets more light through the lens. The aperture is basically like the pupil of an eye, when it is bright the pupil will be small to let less light into the eye, the same goes for the aperture on a lens as it will have a very small aperture which will let in less light in through the lens to expose the 'film' with and of course when its dark the pupil will be bigger to let more light in to help you see which is the same for a lens aperture.

(insert pictures of apertures)

Another lens we were using to film with was the 8mm full frame fisheye, this lens is a very acquired taste to photographers and videographers as it creates a bulge type look to the shot (insert photo here).

This adds caracter to the shots and creates a slightly more dyanmic type of shot to use within the music video, of course the lens cant be overused as with any other teqnique etc.

We used this lens in some close up shots to get a wider frame as it has a 178 degree viewing angle, we also used it during the performance filming to again give a wider point of view and to slightly distort the  frame (insert pictures from use)

Another lens sued was the 50mm 1.8, this lens has a fixed focal point and a low fstop which means that it can be used in darker situations it also gives a nice effect with lower fstops as it has a very shallow depth of field which gives great effects and creates great bokeh. 

(insert pictures taken with the 50mm) (insert bokeh)

When using the lens we fixed the focus point and adjusted the focus by moving closer and further away from the subject this resulted in some extremely nice shots letting the subject drift in and out of focus, prime example would be the end of the music video.

(insert clip form ending) 

With the addition of the spotlights behind the band and the 50mm it created some pleasing lens flares, lens flares are caused when there is a bright light shone into the lens and the light is refracted off the different planes of glass to create a slight haze and particles from each plane of glass in the lens.

The lens flares and the drifting in and out of focus created something quite unique for us all to add into our video to give it that artistic sense and feel.

Location Shots by Matt

Tunnel walkthrough from Crazydodobird

Field walkthrough from Crazydodobird

Skate park walkthrough from Crazydodobird

Copyright Letter

To make sure that we were not infringing any copyright laws by using the song 'Young Blood' we emailed the manager of the band to ask permission to use the song for our A2 Media music video, in which it would be featured. Below is a copy of this email that i sent them on the behalf of our group.

Performance Update

Over the weekend we finally got round to filming our performance part of our video which was going to make up the large majority of what was missing.
We needed to film the performance part of the video urgently as time was becoming scarce and the unfortunate freak snow occurrence last weekend yet again back tracked us, we also needed to nail this footage first time around which we know full well is something very difficult to do but as its only going to make up around half of the video it shouldn't have been too difficult.
On the day we took a large amount of equipment with us; instruments, microphones, cables etc. all of which took over 3 cars, we got to the hall around half 6/7 and started setting up, we encountered numerous problems like figuring out how to quite simply plug in an ipod to play the music out loud (in the end we did another trip back to Matts to get some speakers) another problem was figuring out of the lighting that was already in the hall worked, in the end we also didn't use ay of the lights supplied and just used our own.
We didn't fully start filming until gone ten o'clock and continued up until half 12 in the evening, which we all pretty stressed by the end of it.

Anyway so the following morning i went through all the shots i took, less of the ones on Matts camera and start too put it all together in final cut (total of about 24Gb in memory)

Heres a setup shot from my camera:

The Hall was a converted church and was a really nice scene for our video, pretty much all of the shots were shot with the 18-55mm standard lens but i had brought with me a 50mm 1.8 prime lens to give a nice artistic flare to the shots.







The great thing about the 50mm is that because there is such wide aperture is gives a lot of bokeh to the image so the actual part of the image that is in focus is very small, another thing that i was trying to achieve when filming the close ups of the singers and just general close ups was to get some small lens flares without the camera adapting to the change in light, heres just a quick example from saturday:

As you can see from this video the lens flares really give a slightly more artistic look and feel to the video.

Luke and Danny Filming update

Above you can see a video showing clips of our group filming the early stages of the music video. It shows the problems that we encountered well as in the first clip you can see someone in the background which ruins the entire shot. However probably the most prominent problem that we had to overcome was the terrain with the uneven ground making it hard to get clear and steady shots. This lead us to try and make a steady cam out of pipes bought from B&Q which you can see in the second picture to the left. This was not that effective at first but after some adjustments it proved to be useful and helped us with some of the shots especially with the Go Pro camera. In the first picture you can see the way the sunset makes a good effect on the scene in the way the light comes through the trees.    

We each took it in turns to film but we all had a say in what shot we thought was best at the time. When we had a selection of clips we then could decide what looked best and what would fit in with what we already had. The benefit of having 4 people in the group is there are lots of ideas and angles available so we never really get stuck with what to do next.

In the woods we filmed some of the cross fades of the nature shots. Such as the raindrop on the leaf etc. We also got the actress to do her solo wandering through the woods listening to the song we have chosen for the video. We also got her to walk over a fallen tree as a possible idea - just in
case we thought it looked suitable. Therefore we have other ideas to fall back onto.

January Filming

At the end of the last term unfortunately we hadn't finished our video to a good enough standard for the first rough cut, this meant that we had a lot of filming and work to do over the winter holiday but unfortunately as our group member Matt had gone on holiday for the winter, we were unable to film any footage as a group, i however did some lip syncing with my sister to add into the video as it seemed to be a good idea for our video and possibly one of the only things i could have done to add to the video while our group wasn't a whole.
Here is a quick screen shot of the timeline and another of the programme showing some progress.






The fact that we were not all together for any amount of time over the winter, meant that we have a lot of filming to catch up on now that we're all back at school, we all sat down on our first lesson back and planned out what we are all doing next, including all the footage that needs to be filmed and edited in the remaining time span that we have.
(insert pictures of planning here)

Recently Matt and I have been looking around the web to see how we could make our video slightly more arty as that is something that we would like to do, i looked into possibly getting an anamorphic lens to really throw our video out there and making our video more like that of a film, i also suggested cutting down the size of the video to fit that of an anamorphic aspect ratio (2.33/1). Matt looked into a director called DaveMa, a quite professional videographer with a very unique flare to his work, some of the songs that he has done videos to are some that we were looking at and interested in doing to start with. This one video that he had posted on his blog was to the song 'Clare de Lune' by Flight Facilities which was an in depth narrative to the death of two young women, alos filmed in anamorph with 2x squeeze.  We also needed to relate the video back to the song, IE. more relation between the lyrics and the video to back up our idea of 'young blood'.