My Evaluation for my Music Video

A2 Music Video Evaluation

It is my pleasure to present...

Over the past weeks we had been doing a lot of filming and had finally got all the footage we would need for editing. We began these, what we new would be, very stressful sessions of editing. We came across many hiccups on the way, such as very low disc space and a mix between the scratch card and D-Drive, which prevented a lot of progress for a long duration of time, until we finally could overcome the problem. Additionally, some how some of footage went missing in which we could not recover and although we attempted to re-film, our actress was away for a school trip and when she was back we had little time and she was very busy with her own school work, therefore unable to film. However, past of the unfortunate setbacks that occured during our editing stage, we eventually stayed at school one night until we were the last people on the premisis and finished our work. We then got to school at 6am the next morning and brushed up and fixed all the little errors or poor lypsincing we had analysed the night before.

By 10am, our music video was finished. We posted this draft on youtube:

We then linked the clip to our facebook pages as well as twitter pages, recieving heaps of positive feedback from all our viewers. I asked a family member who works in the industry what she thought and with her critical analysis I began to ask the viewers who had applauded my group what they thought of her analysis. With what they concurred on we made a few changes; such as the fade out of the song at the end of the original, adapting to a long slow end as the bandmembers leave the set. Additionally we perfected some of the lipsyncing in the final close ups of the lead singer before the storyline is finished.

Our Final Music Video

Time to Film...

After our shotlist and storyboard were done and dusted, giving us all the guidance we needed to produce the footage we need for our project, we decided it was time to film.
We had already decided on locations within our previous planning which consisted of; my house for the bedrooms in which the girl and boy are in, London for one of the memories which the boy has, of the two in london together, Maricas Avenue, for the road which the boy walks on to and from the house. Finally, we decided on a space in harrow vue, which is a very large area of fields and hills, overlooking some of harrow. This location was for the band scenes.

A collage of our locations:



It was also essential that we planned our days for filming and therefore created a simple filming schedual to work by. The film schedual implys dates and a basic brief for the days work, however we discussed as a group what to do on the individual days.



Another piece of planning we felt would be helpful was a small chart which related to mise en scene, consisting of all the simple information concerning location, props, actors and costumes. We wanted to make this so that we had a very simple layout of work to look at and easily know where to find what we wanted, rather than a list of words.

Plan

Storyboard and Shotlist…

Shot List for Music Video

Storyboard for Music Video

Magazine Advert...

For our magazine advert, we agreed that we should make it relate very much to the album cover. Therefore we decided to have a comic strip in the background, but rather than have it translucent and hard to see, we made it clear and eye catching. We went through many different comic strips, black and white ones, random hero ones, well-known superhero ones and finally decided that a Superman comic strip would be most effective. We thought that many magazines are read by youngsters and so we thought we had to really make a advert that popped and grabbed the attention of the readers.

Our final draft turned out like this:


We added the red comic background from the album cover for the top strip of the advert, where we have imputed The band name and album title. Additionally we copied as similar yellow strip which features on the bottom of our album cover onto our magazine cover, and replaced the 'DVD with bonus footage' with ratings from critically acclaimed music magazines; RollingStone and QMagazine. Another thing we converted from the album cover was the sticker which reads 'Featuring the hit single For The First Time'. Lastly, we superimposed a picture of the album cover so that the affiliation between the two is noticable, and the awareness is increasingly raised.

Graphic Design Album Covers.

So i had already looked at idyllic setting covers and after research had finalised a prototype for myself. Now time to attempt the opposite, the graphic album cover.
Although there are many types of this edition of album cover,the graphic cover we are more focused on is one which has a design, created by a blend of pictures, or cartoon images, often very colourful.
Examples of this are found in Mika's 'life in cartoon motion' and Keane's 'Under The Iron Sea':

In order to create a professional looking graphic album cover, we had to find out how to work on illustrator or adobe photoshop CS5. Although illustrator was more applicable for graphic design in this case, we decided that as adobe photoshop was much more easily accessible on our school computers, as well as having the most experience on it, we would use that.
It was obvious that our album cover should in some way relate to the name of the album, which we recently decided would be 'Everyday Superheroes'. We thought first about having a picture of the band all wearing normal clothes, with their instruments, but all with red superhero capes on. However, we thought in order for this picture to look professional we would have to have a beautiful day, in which the sun was shining, however, in England in January, these perfect days are hard to come buy. Additionally, this idea didn't feel very much like a graphic album cover. Our next idea was generated from a little Sunday reading, when i was catching up on some comic books. I analysed the cover of Amazing Spiderman #568 as the cover of this particular comic in my collection really appealed to me and most definitely grabbed my attention. It then sprang to my mind that it would be really cool if i could draw a picture of the band, cartoonise the characters, which would be appealing, clever but also stick to our brief of a graphic album cover, however after many attempts to draw this it continued to look unprofessional.

I still thought that the idea of the comic was good so i began to analyse the classic comic conventions. An believed that key connotations of a comic book cover were; a barcode, the name of the comic book, the name of the label and the issue number.
We began to construct an idea which had a comic book strip in a background, giving the album cover the basic convention of a comic which is very easily recognisable. Following that we decided to have the band name in the center of the page as the comic book title, with the album title beneath it, and the issue number in the top left corner, as usual. Finally we superimposed a star sticker with 'featuring the hit singles...' which are often found on albums. Our finish product we were extremely proud of and after much editing we stood back and admired our work.

Album Cover - Idyllic Setting?

I captured a few good shots on my iPhone and edited them with an app called Instagram, which allows you to alter tones, contrasts, with autofixed choices. I used the same effect, called X-Pro II, in order to maintain a similar style on each of the photos. This app was very useful, as it was on my phone I could snap a shot whether i was on the bus, in the car, walking to school or when we were actually on location, and add the effect and save the photo there and then. I've taken many photos on this app and because of the effects we all agreed it suited the idea of having an idyllic setting as an album cover, so we went through them all and chose which ones we liked most. Out of them, a suprisingly plain photo ended up looking quite appealing. The colours were attractive, with a sillouette of a hill with a fence on the top, with the sun setting behind it. The picture gave us room to edit and also put in text and the two best ideas we had ended up like this:


What we liked about these adaptions of the photograph, were that they were very plain, with not a lot of writing or too many effects piled on top of eachother, which is evidently what a idyllic setting album cover is expected to be like. I personally prefered the picture on the right, because the contrast and brightness had been kept reletivly close to the original picture, whereas the picture on the left had been increased and enhanced. Furthermore, this allowed a clearer view of the sunset and the fence, rather than in the first picture in which there is just a bright light. Additionally, the titles are central with an all capital font, which is easy to see and easy to read. The centre line allows the viewer to notice straight away what the picture is, also not taking too much away from the picture, but creating more awareness of the artist and album, rather than just the beautiful shot. We liked the finished product and all agreed that the 2nd picture was a lot better, however, we still wanted to venture further into the other side of things. Time to look at grapic album covers...