FINAL DIGIPAK

FINAL MUSIC VIDEO

FINAL POSTER

Feedback on Director's Commentary

Feeling Good

Abbi Douetail, Will Edgely, Isabel Boddy and Lizzie Ward Thomas


Excellent and considerate understanding of the technologies used in production of the video, for example in terms of digital picture quality and the use of FCP. There are evident links between creative decision making and use of technology on both productions of the video using professional digital cameras and in the post production editing process – in discussion of match of action, lip syncing and graphic matching. This is sustained and thorough and accurate in discussion of the branded themes of the MV of S&M. The commentary shows a discrete awareness of the use of new media technology and uses discriminating examples really well, particularly to selection and construction of narrative, using masks and editing techniques, such as cross cutting Excellent command of terminology and well presented – understands and discusses convergence really well. There is sustained justified decision making links between the technologies used the product and audience reception.
This is a well considered documentary, well done.

Task 4: Media technology in Poster and Digipak

Photoshop is a creatie software used for editing or image manipulation. We used it in order to make a creative Digipak and Poster. Two key techniques which we used are layering and saturation.

POSTER
Firstly, we chose a photo from the many professional photo's we had taken of our band on our photoshoot day. With this, we then firstly changed the colours to black and white using the colour effect tool on Photoshop.

We then used Google as a research tool in order to save an image of a 'best seller' sticker for the poster. We used layering in order to get it onto the poster on photoshop and then the crop and shrink tool to scale it to our poster, holding ctrl whilst we did this so that it would scale correctly.

We got the contrast up on Photoshop and increased this so there was more contrast. The high contrast along with the black and white effect gave our band the dark feel which we hoped to portray in our poster, demonstrating our star image more than ever. We then used the 'T' tool in order to add text for the information on our poster which included release dates, tour dates and the name of our band 'The Vibe'.

DIGIPAK
In terms of our digipak, we decided on what we wanted to go in each panel. We made our frontcover quite early on using Photoshop again, and then used photos from our photoshoot day for the inside panels, and edited again the back cover on Photoshop. We used this software in order to put together all of our Digipak and thus Photoshop helped us create a professional and effective CD Digipak for our band. The front cover was made using layering from 3 different pictures. We saved all three pictures from google, the first one being a picture of a pentigram, the second Leonardo Divinci and the third was a landscape. The picture of the landscape gave us the idea for Spanning Three Borders as our album name. We used the 'T' text tool again to add this album title, again selecting whatever font and size we wanted. The back cover was a picture which we also grabbed from Google, a picture of a girls legs hanging.

However, we edited the contrast and the brightness once we had inserted this picture into Photoshop. Therefore, Google helped us excessively as a research tool, however we made it our own and could manipulate and edit everything exactly how we wanted it thanks to Photoshop. We grabbed a bar code of google and shrunk this to the size we needed, keeping everything in proposion. For the left inside panel we used singular pictures of each band member which we had taken on the photoshoot day.

We cropped each picture and transformed them so that we could layer them all together so it looked like one picture with them all standing in different places. We then whitened the background to make this effect even greater. For the right hand side, we again used a picture from our photoshoot day and edited the contrast and brightness and tranformed the picture so it fit the size of the panel. Each picture from our photoshoot day was individually edited in Photoshop before hand, again showing the importance of this software in the making of our ancillary tasks.

Task 4: Media Technology in Pre-Production

Before we filmed and edited our music video, we drew out a storyboard of what we wanted our shots to look like. We then stuck these storyboards up on the wall so we could film each 'shot' that was drawn out. We used a Sony NX 5 to shoot them. We then edited all these shots together using Final Cut and synced the shots up to our song. Therefore, we basically had a rough cut of our actual music videos. This proves how media technologies allowed us to get a feel for what our music video would look like and therefore change anything which we didn't thnik fit the song. This was crucial as our storyboard animation allowed us to realise that we had some shots at the end that were too slow and that we did not have enough intense action in our video. We then had time to think about this and establish the changes before the shooting day. Thus, this media technology was a significant part in our pre-production and our music video may not have turned out as well without our storyboard animatic.

Here is a screen recording of us editing our storyboard animatic together:

This website itself (eBlogger) has been a vital piece of online technology which has helped us significantly in our coursework and final product of our music video. It has allowed us to blog all the planning and research as well as any ideas that come to mind therefore acting as a kind of scrapbook or notepad full of everything to make sure we do not forget any ideas. It also puts everything in one place and makes it a bit more organised, for example, with the months and years tabs down the right hand side.

Here is a hyperlink to a web page which talks about the advantages in Blogging, these are all also beneficial to us in relation to our coursework:
Benefits of blogging

New advances in technology have also brought advances in mobile phones, including the very useful iPhone. We used iPhones to take pictures of anything we drew out, for example drawings of our set design or location. We could therefore upload this straight to blogger or email it to wherever it needed to go straight from the iPhone. In addition, we used iPhone's to get images of our band and cast members, which we then uploaded straight to blogger and used to email to teachers to get these students out of the lessons when we needed to shoot them. This also allowed us to also look at the images quickly and work out which cast member would suit what outfit or shot and get more of a feel for the cast. This shows how modern media technology has made our planning for our music video extremely simple and quick, for example we could just take a snapshot of whatever we needed on our iPhones without having to find a professional camera or photographer.

It seems like an obvious one, but the internet of course was a vital form of media technology and our coursework could not have been successful without it. We used it mainly as a research tool but we also used it to access websites such as eBlogger, YouTube and google. Google was of course important in the research of bands, album covers and anything else we had a querie of. However, YouTube was specifically important for us so we could look up Music Video's to get some inspiration. Although this is not pre-production YouTube was also significant as our video would not be on the internet right now had it not been for YouTube, and this would have also affected the feedback we received.

Although most photo's and similar could be taken on iPhone's, we did organise a photoshoot with a photography student to take pictures of our band. This is because we needed photos for our digipak and poster and therefore wanted them to be professionally taken on a professional camera. This day went really well and led to a very satisfying digipak and poster, and this could not have been achieved had it not been for the photography studio, the professional camera, and Photoshop, the editing and image manipulation software that we used in order to layer and adjust the saturation. These are all media technologies and so highlight further how vital these were in our coursework.