Shot List for Music Video
Storyboard for Music Video
Thursday, 31 March 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
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...
Monday, 28 March 2011
Science & Faith vs Everyday Superheroes
The orignal album name for the Script was 'Science & Faith', which we actually loved and found really interesting as in the song which is the origin for the album title talks about the relationship between love and science in many interesting ways. For instance, the chorus says "You wont find faith or hope, down the telescope. You wont find heart and soul in the sky. You can bring everything down to chemicals, but you cant explain a love like mind."
The concept of the song was fantastic, however in this coursework assignment we are focusing on a song, not the band. Therefore we tried to relate our ideas directly to the song choice 'For The First Time'. Having recently done research and a powerpoint on the band, which included their new album, as well as reasons and meanings behind our song choice, i had a knowledge of the songs background. The music video to the song especially, along with its background encapsulates how in so many places over the world people were getting stripped of their homes and possessions due to the recession. In the video, the couple are finding life extremely difficult for this reason, and eventually, the male lead sells his bike for tickets for the two to leave America and go back home where they feel safe, with their families who need them. After viewing this we all felt as though the man in the video was courageous, brave and finally, extremely caring. He sold his mode of transport, he lost his job, he spent all of his money on plane tickets, he forgot about the future he wanted, simply in the name of love, to save his relationship. He is a hero. The song was from then on seen in a different light, it wasnt about meeting someone for the first time, but a much deeper message. People all over the world were in difficult positions, terrible times, but they saved the hearts of the people they loved, and they have to do it daily. Hence the new title name we came up with; EVERYDAY SUPERHEROES.
Font Ideas:
The concept of the song was fantastic, however in this coursework assignment we are focusing on a song, not the band. Therefore we tried to relate our ideas directly to the song choice 'For The First Time'. Having recently done research and a powerpoint on the band, which included their new album, as well as reasons and meanings behind our song choice, i had a knowledge of the songs background. The music video to the song especially, along with its background encapsulates how in so many places over the world people were getting stripped of their homes and possessions due to the recession. In the video, the couple are finding life extremely difficult for this reason, and eventually, the male lead sells his bike for tickets for the two to leave America and go back home where they feel safe, with their families who need them. After viewing this we all felt as though the man in the video was courageous, brave and finally, extremely caring. He sold his mode of transport, he lost his job, he spent all of his money on plane tickets, he forgot about the future he wanted, simply in the name of love, to save his relationship. He is a hero. The song was from then on seen in a different light, it wasnt about meeting someone for the first time, but a much deeper message. People all over the world were in difficult positions, terrible times, but they saved the hearts of the people they loved, and they have to do it daily. Hence the new title name we came up with; EVERYDAY SUPERHEROES.Font Ideas:
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Whats next...
We had now decided on our genre, our band and finally our song and were especially delighted that we had concluded with a synopsis for our own music video, after much deliberation. The next step for our music video was create a storyboard and a shot list and then once these are drafted and finalised, we can film.
We split the group in half, assigning Alan and Adam the role of planning the shot list, whilst Josh and I began thinking about our ancillary tasks; a album cover, and a magazine advertisement. We decided to first look at album covers and initially, we researched into our genre and both liked the use of setting in many indie rock album covers. Kings of Leon especially used fluorescent colours with an attractive setting to appeal to their audience. In many cases we agreed that simplicity seemed to work well, however we also concurred that Kings of Leon's simple but effective album cover was for their fourth album, which intruiged us. After discussing we both thought that in order to release such a simple looking cover, the band has to already have credited success and acclaim. Additionally, we thought we should try and do something a bit special for our album cover, rather than take the easy route and find a nice picture or nice scenery, even though we found it appealing ourselves.
This left us bemused as we thought, if done right, both simple and extravagant album covers worked very well. We decided then to try a bit of both and compare further on in the process, when we had the two extra votes of our other group members.
Here are some of our early attempts of capturing an 'idyllic setting' on camera:
We split the group in half, assigning Alan and Adam the role of planning the shot list, whilst Josh and I began thinking about our ancillary tasks; a album cover, and a magazine advertisement. We decided to first look at album covers and initially, we researched into our genre and both liked the use of setting in many indie rock album covers. Kings of Leon especially used fluorescent colours with an attractive setting to appeal to their audience. In many cases we agreed that simplicity seemed to work well, however we also concurred that Kings of Leon's simple but effective album cover was for their fourth album, which intruiged us. After discussing we both thought that in order to release such a simple looking cover, the band has to already have credited success and acclaim. Additionally, we thought we should try and do something a bit special for our album cover, rather than take the easy route and find a nice picture or nice scenery, even though we found it appealing ourselves.
Kings of Leon Album Cover - Come Around Sundown
This left us bemused as we thought, if done right, both simple and extravagant album covers worked very well. We decided then to try a bit of both and compare further on in the process, when we had the two extra votes of our other group members.
Here are some of our early attempts of capturing an 'idyllic setting' on camera:
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Emotion.
In our music video idea, we are planning on having the boy in the relationship to try and console the girl, and she refuses to let him back into her heart and pushes him away. In this scene it is vital they get the emotional aspects right; we need to portray realism and emotion through their movements and the way their touch eachother. We really want the viewer to feel sympathy and we want to evoke a lot of emotion from this scene, so we decided to study some other music video which have these qualities.
Green Day - When September Ends
In this music video we are presented with a teenage couple, who are irrevocably in love. They both feel as though they need eachother and treat eachother as if they were eachothers oxygen. However, the boy is very poor and can't support them as a couple well, so he enrolls himself in the army. At this moment in the video the girl comes outside where the boy is contemplating her reactions to this decision and as he guessed it's not good. These 15-20 seconds of dialogue are so limitlessly emotional, with the girl sobbing and the boy trying to console her but his guilt leads to anger. The realism in the scene is also something that i found amazing and really fuelled the song and video with emotion and energy. From this moment on, when the two are seperated due to his leave, the music is amplified with energy and becomes very powerful, thus creating a phenominal, perfect blend and relation between the music and the video.
Green Day - When September EndsIn this music video we are presented with a teenage couple, who are irrevocably in love. They both feel as though they need eachother and treat eachother as if they were eachothers oxygen. However, the boy is very poor and can't support them as a couple well, so he enrolls himself in the army. At this moment in the video the girl comes outside where the boy is contemplating her reactions to this decision and as he guessed it's not good. These 15-20 seconds of dialogue are so limitlessly emotional, with the girl sobbing and the boy trying to console her but his guilt leads to anger. The realism in the scene is also something that i found amazing and really fuelled the song and video with emotion and energy. From this moment on, when the two are seperated due to his leave, the music is amplified with energy and becomes very powerful, thus creating a phenominal, perfect blend and relation between the music and the video.
Monday, 7 March 2011
Music Video Ideas...
We loved the existing video, but it was time to start thinking of ideas for our own interpretation of the song.
After creating both idea's we decided that the second choice would be much more appropriate for us as students. I prefer the storyline of the first idea and believe that in the music industry it would be more preferable to our second idea, however our second is much simpler and isnt too far out of our comfort zone!
Our Final Idea - Synopsis...
Our final idea which has come from idea #2 and #1, and is one we are all happy with, which presents a romantic storyline showing the resurrection of love through the re-visitation of special moments for the two. We loved the first idea and therefore wanted to keep a bit of it in our video, so decided to still have the couple remember significant moments of their relationship, however these moments are on a much smaller scale, so rather than a concert or a party where they shared their first kiss, its 'a night in when they fall asleep on the sofa that they will always remember' kind of thing :)
The storyline for this idea...
The couple are going through a phase of arguments and reluctancy in their relationship which has been building over the past few days. The male counter-part is desperate to fix the situation and tries to stop fighting his corner and console his partner, but she is not willing to drop the anger and pushes him away, so he leaves, hoping to find his feet and regain his courage. During their seperation, they both stumble upon a photo album which they indulge in. They rekindle old sentimental memories that they shared and will hold forever and through this they realise the pointlessness of their dispute and fine their love again.
After creating both idea's we decided that the second choice would be much more appropriate for us as students. I prefer the storyline of the first idea and believe that in the music industry it would be more preferable to our second idea, however our second is much simpler and isnt too far out of our comfort zone!
Our Final Idea - Synopsis...
Our final idea which has come from idea #2 and #1, and is one we are all happy with, which presents a romantic storyline showing the resurrection of love through the re-visitation of special moments for the two. We loved the first idea and therefore wanted to keep a bit of it in our video, so decided to still have the couple remember significant moments of their relationship, however these moments are on a much smaller scale, so rather than a concert or a party where they shared their first kiss, its 'a night in when they fall asleep on the sofa that they will always remember' kind of thing :)
The storyline for this idea...
The couple are going through a phase of arguments and reluctancy in their relationship which has been building over the past few days. The male counter-part is desperate to fix the situation and tries to stop fighting his corner and console his partner, but she is not willing to drop the anger and pushes him away, so he leaves, hoping to find his feet and regain his courage. During their seperation, they both stumble upon a photo album which they indulge in. They rekindle old sentimental memories that they shared and will hold forever and through this they realise the pointlessness of their dispute and fine their love again.
'For The First Time' by The Script
The song was released on August 20, 2010 as the lead single from the band's second studio album Science & Faith. It debuted at number one on the Irish Singles Chart, becoming The Script's first number-one single.The single debuted at number five on the UK Singles Chart before moving up to number-four the following week.
Danny O'Donoghue of The Script told the story behind the song in an interview with Sydney Radio Station: "The song 'For the First Time' was about a time when we got back after touring around the world. We wanted to press palms with the people who had really gotten us there, and we got home and realised there's a stark reality out there, the recession, people are losing their jobs and their valuable things, and we thought, it almost pales in comparison to your news. We started the song, and it ended up being a bit bleak and we felt we really needed a great message, to turn it around... so we needed a message of hope, as people are being stripped of all these things they're realising what's really important. It's all about going back to basics: drinking cheap wine, eating your dinner off the floor. That's when you meet each other for the first time, when you have nothing."As a group we were really drawn to this song and the background of it. The band are really humble and put a lot of thought, emotion and heart behind their music and their lyrics and truly care about their fans. The song is the kind of song you can listen to to get you back on your feet when you feel really down; we would very much prefer to do a powerful, meaningful song like this than a song which is one dimensional.
The existing music video follows an Irish couple who have moved to America to follow their dreams. The opening of the video presents Eve Hewson, with damp eyes, writing a letter home to her family. Immediately, the viewer is drawn into the narrative because of the emotion presented in her expressions and body language. We also grasp that the girl is a family orientated individual and this blend of emotion with her photography of the sun and sky in later shots represent her admiration for the finer things in life, whereas her boyfriend is struggling to get a job and is working non-stop, having forgotten what really matters. The actors in the narrative perform exceptionally and really evoke the emotion they demonstrate for the fans.
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Time To Choose...
It came to the point in our planning phase in which we had to decide on a music genre and subsequently, the song we are going to use in our music video.
We then analysed our mindmap, discussing the pros and cons we had already thought of in more depth as a group. We decided on 'Soft Rock' and 'Indie Rock' as our two genres, then chose two songs in each genre to finally decide from.
After creating this mindmap we once again delved into deep discussion on the songs and finalised with 'For The First Time' by The Script. Not only do we love the song, but we felt out of our final four choices, it was the song we could imput our ideas and imaginations into the best.
We then analysed our mindmap, discussing the pros and cons we had already thought of in more depth as a group. We decided on 'Soft Rock' and 'Indie Rock' as our two genres, then chose two songs in each genre to finally decide from.
After creating this mindmap we once again delved into deep discussion on the songs and finalised with 'For The First Time' by The Script. Not only do we love the song, but we felt out of our final four choices, it was the song we could imput our ideas and imaginations into the best.
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