Thursday, 13 May 2010

Monday, 26 April 2010

Friday, 19 March 2010

What have you learnt from your audience feedback? Part 2

Peers felt slightly different. They liked the focus on the main character but felt she looked a little boring in the shot on her own all the time, they felt that something in the background would be more interesting.

So acting on this we applied many chroma-key effects to the backdrop - removing the sky and behind that layering up more clips of Lorna to give the audience more too look at in the video.It was beneficial hearing from others, as in the eyes of me and the rest of my group the video seemed fine, and seeing parts over and over we get used to the video so may not pick up on certain parts like the repetition of a character or getting bored of the same sort of shot for example. Audience feedback gives us the oppertunity to build on what we already have, and in the real media industry this would be vital, as products would need to appeal to as many people as possible. In this situation it is important to know what people think.

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



Media technologies were used throughout the duration of the project, ranging from filming equipment to editing software.

Whilst making the project I used such technologies as a digital camera on a fig rig - this benifited my shooting as I was able to hold the shot more steady and get a smooth movement. I also used editing programmes like Final Cut Pro to edit the video together. This software is industry standard so helped make the video look brilliant. I also learnt how to use photoshop, a picture editing softeware that enabled me to create vibrant and interesting DVD covers and posters.

During the research and planning stages I used computer programmes such as microsoft word and powerpoint. These office programmes enable you to create presentations and documents with ease, which helped me in my music video presentation and when writing a questionare. I also used the internet and sites like Youtube to look up music videos from artists from my genre. I could look at their videos and draw conventions to use in my own video.

To evaluate my project I used a blogging site called 'Blogger.com'. This site enabled me to keep more or less a record of how the project was progressing. It enabled me to show the examiner how the whole portfolio went, and allowed me to show my knoledge of the topic and to really demonstrate my contribution to the project.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Over the course of the project I have had a lot of feedback about the video, some from people my own age and some from teachers. This gives me a good range of opinions and enables me to see not only what my target audience thought of the video but what others, who are a bit older and so may not be into this new kind of music.

Teachers said our video was a little repetitive. At this point we did not have a lot on animation to break up the stream of shots of Lorna. Acting on this we filmed more lego parts to water this down a bit and to make the lego a more integral part of the whole video. We also added different effects to the clips of Lorna, like the duplicate effect, where the clip is shown more then once in the frame. This gave a different feel to the video and made it more interesting to look at.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts Part 2

From the video I also developed on the theme of the Keyboard. I used the instrument on every part of my ancillary task to relate not only to the video but to the very genre itself. It is called 'synthpop' because it uses many synthesised sounds, so I felt it necessary to feature the instrument that makes this kind of music possible. In this way my ancillary task can relate directly to the music itself, as well as the video where a synthesiser was used.

Whilst editing the photos of Lorna using Photoshop I also used a 'neon glow' effect, which not only looked good but related directly to the artist's to the artist name 'Allegro Neon'.

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




My media product and Ancillary tasks link together well in many ways, for one my ancillary tasks are based on colours from the video - Purple and blue; these colours are used in our artist's main costume throughout the video. I decided to develop on this idea as from my research I had seen that strong colours play a vital roll in advertising and in our specific genre. In Jay-Z's latest album release 'Blueprints 3' he uses red and white as his main colour scheme, and these can be seen on album covers, posters and tour tickets. I used many isometric shapes to create a kaleidoscope effect with blue and purple around the outside, as this sort of strange futuristic effect can be seen in many Synthpop videos, in particular the official video of 'Bulletproof'. All the shapes which appear on the floor are isometric, and the whole set indeed is isometric in shape with many straight lines. I developed on this idea and made it my own in my ancillary task.

Evaluation - In what ways does your media product challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our video challenges many aspects of music videos and the synthpop genre as a whole. Synthpop videos are normally quite studio based - That is they are recorded in film studios and don't normally venture outside. We however decided to go against this idea and film a good portion of the video out in an ally and in a field. We did keep the film studio aspect to the video as I felt his was crucial, but tried to be original with this particular idea.

Evaluation - In what ways does your media product develop forms and conventions of real media products? Part 2




Throughout our video we were constantly developing conventions of music videos and our own genre.The synthpop genre is one that is very commertial in music terms to appeal to the mass audience, so we tried to reflect that in our video. We did a good portion of filming in the Music studio to visually represent this idea that the artist is more studio based then others. This also develops from the idea of a performing artist in videos, as in most music videos the band/ artist is seen performing as if doing a live gig. Our artist however did not, we tried to keep the performing aspect as this is a critical part of music videos, but move the location from a stage to a recording studio.

Evaluation - In what ways does your media product use forms and conventions of real media products?


My media product took the form of a music video, which is a very specific form of media. There are many different codes and conventions that need to be followed, especially with our chosen genre - Girl Synthpop. Our video took a Disjuncture form, meaning the images do not relate to the lyrics. This was a feature we observed from watching videos by people like Lady Gaga - her videos do not follow any sort of story and focus more on her singing and dancing like in her video of 'Poker Face'. She is singing about love, but we do not see this at all. The video consists of her dancing and playing cards. We used the principle of Graphic continuity in our editing through the use of the main singer; because we were editing in a montage fashion, the clips do not follow a liner path, so need a common feature to link them together. Like many music videos, our focus was on the main singer.Rhythmic cuts were also used to cut in time with the music, a major feature of all music videos. Great effort was made to lip sink every shot as this is crucial in music videos.

To relate to our genre we used the conventions of one main female singer to front the video, waring colourful costumes with many changes in hairstyle. Again this inspiration came from Lady Gaga, who has been at the forefront of the mainstream synthpop genre for many years.

Sunday, 21 February 2010

My final poster


My final inside cover


My final front DVD cover


The Neon Effect

For all of my images of my artist I felt they were quite plain being left as they had been taken, so I went through and added an effect that would relate to my artists name 'Allegro Neon'. I added a 'Neon light' effect which really brought the images out - especially on my poster. I experimented with the functions to create an inner glow on each of the images. I changed the colour of this glow to purple or blue to keep to my set coulur scheme.

Creating Poster

A poster is important as its soul responsibility is to sell the album/DVD. I decided to keep mi one quite plain to bring focus to the main image of Lorna walking up stairs made of a keyboard. I carried on my main colour scheme of purple and blue by choosing a plain blue background and added some purple gradient to the corners to create an effect interesting to look at. I observed from other posters that there are normally reviews from magazines and newspapers commenting on the album, which I included. I also added a relice date and formates on which the album would be reliced (CD, DVD etc.). I included a web address that could led fans on to learn more about my artist and lastly put in tour dates, all of which I had seen being deomonstrated on other album posters. For my main image I carried on the central theme of keyboards by having my artist walking down a set of stairs made of a keyboard. This then warped round and through the album name.

Creating my inside DVD cover

For my inside DVD cover I wanted to carry on my theme I established on the outer cover. I began by using the gradient key to create the colourful spectrum pattern on the left pannel. I then had to build using individual squares the purple and blue checkered backdrop on the right. With these two backgrounds I cound now press on and create text with track listings and the album name, as these were some inside themes I had found on DVDs I had looked at. I then inserted a picture of my main singer like my design. I wanted it to look like the light was comming from behind her, so I experimented with lighting effects and colour to try and create this, after cropping her image. I then began to add the keyboards to the image, comming round and down like in my design, using the warp options for pictures.

Creating my DVD cover

Using the programme 'Photoshop', I used many different effects to create my cover. I measured the size of an existing DVD cover to create an appropriatly sized canvus to begin with. I had to create the isometric purple and blue box effect on the back of the cover by hand, drawing out individual boxes which took a long time. When they were all lined up, I could merge the layers together to create one single one. I gradually built up my design layer by layer, to create the strange world my lead singer resided in. Looking at album covers for La Roux's album it looked as if the world she was standing in had been created on a computer. I tried to do the same, building solid walls for her picture to stand behind, and adding lighting effects to make it look more believable.

Artist and album name

After much discussion, me and my group chose the name Allegro Neon for a band name. We wanted something fairly short, but at the same time interesting for any reader. WE found it hard to invent one by ourselves, so we decided to create an anagrame of our main actors real name, with the help of an internet website. Upon looking at the results I discovered one of the words was 'Allegro' which is a musical term for playing fast and joyfully, so for me this was was an imediate choice.'Neon' also relates to our genre, as neon lights are related to the night club scene, which is highly influentual in Synthpop music.
To chose the name 'Luzes' we wanted something strange and exotic, so we went on a translation website and began to translate the word 'Lights' into many different languages untill we found one we liked, which happened to be portuguese.

Font Choices

To choose my fonts for the project, I went on a website called 'Da Font', which is a database of free downloadable fonts which can be used for anything. I found many fonts that would have worked well, but the font I wanted was a 'handwriting' type of font, which I found called 'Jed'. I used this for my main title and a front called 'Jellyka Endless Voyage', which I used for my track listing. This decorative font reflected the elaborate nature of the genre.

Designs




Before I started to produce my media products on photoshop, I started by designing my media products on a sheet of paper with color. I used the keyboard to create an innovative collidoscope effect on the front cover, with isometric square patters that carried through all the products.

A Choice of Theme

For my theme I chose to use a Synthisiser Keyboard, as I feel ths best represents the genre as well as its role in the video. I also chose a colour scheme of dark purple and blue, as these were the colours warn by Lorna for her main costume.

Ancillery Tasks

To accompany the music video, I also had to produce 3 other pieces of media: A 4 sided DVD cover and a poster advertising the release. To go about this project I first had to do some research into the typical aspects of DVD covers and posters - in particular music albums. Some key features I found was:

- A track listing
- Pictures of the artist
- Screen shots from the videos
- An overall colour scheme to link the package and a central 'theme', E.G Jay-Z's recent album 'Blueprint 3' had a central theme of 3 red lines, and these can be found throughout his whole marketing campaign
- Dates for tours on posters
- Quotes from magazine reviews

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Lip-syncing and Final Tweeks

Because we had applied a new track to the video, it didn't exactly sync up with the track we had before. Me and the rest of the group had to therefore go through and sync up the clips again. This was tedious but didn't take too long. Our video was now finally completed with a good quality music track, and looked brilliant. I was very pleased with the final outcome as I felt it looked very professional and had many qualities that would appeal to many people my age.

Problems with the track

Throughout the editing process there have been a few problems with our music track. Because me and my group aquired it off of the school digital music library, it is highly compressed and not of a good quality. I therefore took it upon myself to go home and download the professional track off of itunes. I took the new track off of La Roux's debute album, which is in stereo and of a much better quality.

Final Editing

In this last proper editing session me, Siobhan and Alex worked on putting lots of effects on all the clips on the video. Nearly every clip has some sort of effect on it, as our chosen genre is one which requires this. Synthpop is futuristic and innavative, so can normally be found with many elaborate effects. In this one session our video suddenly came together. Up to this point it looked good, but still fairly amatury. Adding the effect brought it together and added a professional quality to it. We also spent some time just tidying the end of the video up, so it flows as well as the rest of the video. It now fits well into the overall project.

Half Term Editing

During the Half Term holiday, me and my group were able to come into school to work on our project - to spend a good 6 hours working on the project and getting all new footage edited in and cut in time with the music. We managed to get the whole project done apart from the ending, which needed a lot of looking at in the first place, as originally it had been created out of only two seperate clips, where as the rest of the video had up to 6 layers of footage.

Re-editing

Now our reshooting is complete, we have a much larger archive of footage to work with. Looking through the footage while uploading The overall quality is much better then before. We have taken more time when filming to make sure lighting, costume and hair styling is just the way we want it. Our project has been moved from the Media surver onto an individual computer to increase processing time and to make the whole editing process quicker.We therefore had to spend some time reconnecting all our media in our project, as all our footage had moved location too. With our project set up and all footage uploaded we could begin importing our new footage and syncing it up with the track, to then cut away and import into the project.

More Animation

As we felt the animation in our video was limited, we all decided more was needed to make it more significant. We set up a blue screen behind the lego to colour key it out later on the computer, to combine it with live action footage. We used characters we had created before to link all the lego parts of the story together. I had an idea to build on the 'Egyptian/ Wizard' part of lego we had filmed before (which fratures after the first chorus). I thought we could build a story out of it in which the wizard creates the Egypitan, then he attemps to get rid of him as he is michievious and not what he expected. This little storyline does not fir with the lyrics, but links the lego parts together. When watching the video, the audience will be able to engage with the lego parts more if there is a small storyline going on, and the slightly humourous nature of it would be amusing to watch.

'Film Studio' Filming Session

Me, Siobhan, and Alex aranged an after school filming session in PDH to film our studio work. We book PDH a week in advance to make sure it would be free. We had a very productive session, filming many different things with Lorna, including a having her just standing in one position whilst the fig rig moves around her. We also had an idea to use a white scree, with Lorna dancing in front. This created an interesting innovative idea that would be great to watch. Behind the screen Siobhan and Alex began dancing, casting shadows on the screen. This type of music would be music typically heared in a club, so dancing is something most associated with it. In an hour we managed to get all the studio work done.

Wednesday, 20 January 2010

The Idea of a 'Film Studio'



Through the Synthpop genre there is a clear pattern in setting. Because the songs are so commertial, a good portion of videos are filmed in studios. This is most clear in Little Boot's video 'Remidy'. She is performing in a dark room with studio lights and keyboards. I felt it was important to include this in the video, so we decided to use the big drama performing space to create this same effect.

Saturday, 16 January 2010

Reshooting (The Ally and The Road)

As some shots were a bit dark the first time we shot in the ally, we felt it would be good to refilm this bit, which would also give us more to work with editingwise, as Lorna had got extentions in her hair, making her look very different.

We refilmed relitivly quickly, so made an on the spot decision to go to a nearby road and film another take of the sone, this time with Lorna walking down the road. We had two members of the group on 'Car Duty' , watching out for cars whilst the rest of the group used the fig rig to film Lorna walking in a midshot.