Friday 11 December 2009

Evaluation - Vonnie Pigott

Music video and Ancillary products
The song we’d picked for the video was ‘No looking back’ by a Cambridge band Anti-Social Burn-outs. The style of the song was quite heavy rock so it was that genre that we took most inspiration from, using lots of examples we compiled a series of products that followed conventions, mainly using dark lighting and colours.
Because of the genre, the video was going to be more about convention, as the breaking of convention is more common to indie or alternative music videos. When it comes to rock videos and products dark colours are key and are mainly about what the audience expects of it to gain more success, considering rock is a more mainstream genre.
The style of music meant that we decided the video should be very performance based rather than narrative based. The narrative was supposed to be quite vague, enough to understand a very basic plot (Guy training for a fight) but the idea was that there were a lot of pieces that the audience had to fill in themselves as is common with these kind of videos, in Animal I have become (three days grace) for example, the story is incredibly vague and feels like parts of a longer film and so the lyrics and the imagination of the viewer must fill in the gaps.
This was one of the videos we took some ideas from, mainly the performance but originally a lot more of the narrative. We were also influenced by other rock videos such as ‘Animals’ By Nickelback and ‘Afterlife’ by Avenged sevenfold which are very performance driven videos, animals especially which is all performance, we borrowed the way that they use a hand held camera and move around the band a lot. Afterlife is another example of a vague narrative but is a lot more abstract than Animal I have become.
We didn’t link the lyrics to the visuals but there were subtle hints, such as when the lyrics say ‘I am strong and I won’t be pulled apart’ at one point the female character blew a kiss towards the screen subtly hinting that this pulling apart could come from a woman, trying to distract and ruin somebody in the evil way that femme fatales are shown to do in films.
The lighting in the video itself was quite contrasting and bright at some points, such as in the beginning when the light suddenly changes when on the guitarist, but was dark and more gothic at others (Such as the bass footage.)
Though most of the performers costumes weren’t planned the guitarist was made to wear quite dark clothes and the bassist’s outfit was black and white and looked very gothic and the black makeup made her fit with the music better. The black lipstick was originally inspired by Jonas Akerlund’s (director, Papparazzi – Lady gaga) style of using makeup but it was an effect that was too difficult to achieve, I still liked the idea of using black lipstick however.
When it came to the Digipak we took a lot of inspiration from the covers of bands like Bullet for my valentine which use realistically cartooned images, the fact that it’s an illustration is contrapuntal to the sinister images they use (a bleeding woman) and we tried a similar thing, though not as violent the image of a scary looking woman holding fire is quite creepy. The woman on the cover was not meant to represent anyone in particular but looked similar enough to the one female band member to at least look like it relates, but even the idea of using somebody who is not in the band was inspired again by Bullet for my valentine’s covers who use a female character quite often despite being an all male band. The rest of the Digipak however was our own work, going slightly against convention by using quite surreal and trippy imagery with the colourful fire patterns.
The magazine advert was not very different to the Digipak, but it was meant to relate quite strongly to the Album. We used the image that was on the cover because it worked as a nice and simple image against a black background, it also worked in the way that it would make the Digipak itself more recognisable, as the point is to promote the album and not the band in this advert the audience needed to be able to find the CD easily in a store as they would recognise the advert image.
The fonts were quite gothic to fit with the theme, as a lot of elements of our band had been quite dark like this, a font called ‘A Lolita Scorned’ which looks almost as though it was dripping. The band name used a different font to stand out slightly more; it also had a glow effect behind it that added to the creepy effect (as it was a dark red.)
The Digipak used some images of two of the band members; these images were taken from the video itself and then drawn over using vectors, a viewer could link this back to the video as the images were generic and look as though they could’ve come from any point in the video. The stills were drawn over for several reasons: the original stills were very dark and bad quality, it looked brighter and worked with the surreal swirls and it fit with the cover far better. We avoided using the bands head or faces to add a sense of mystery to the band themselves, making them seem darker.
The imagery we used a lot was that of fire, the fire orb appears on the cover, the back and on the spine. This was because it related to the narrative of our video, which was meant to be quite strong and show the characters passion and hatred, the fire was a representation of this. It was also meant to help show the strength and passion that goes with the style of the bands music, as Anti-social Burnouts style of songs are quite heavy. Fire is quite common as a representation of passion, strength and hatred so it felt like an image that would work well. It was also more subtly used in the swirls, which are meant to look very vaguely like fire as well.

The feedback we got on the Digipak said similar things, they said ‘the gothic style of the design suits the style of music, this is undeniably going to be heavy rock with little attempt to be mainstream.’ This in essence is the effect we had wished to achieve from the digipak, we wanted the cover to say something about the style of music contained within it so the Digipak was definatly effective. In regards to the magazine advert we were told that the ‘Colours and image blend well together, writing font matches theme of the band’ So the fonts seemed to worked, considering there were three different fonts
We were also told that; ‘The use of the same image for the magazine ad is an obvious consistency but as it's such a striking image - it is direct and effective.’ Which again what we were aiming for, there was an obvious instant recognition that the two were related by an audience and the simple image aparently worked well if it was described as ‘Striking.’ This is good as it means that our Digipak will stand out to an audience and if nothing else at least interest them in finding out what it is.
There was not much response to the video, we were told that it fit in well with a lot of conventions, again something we were aiming for as we weren’t trying to go against convention. The problems with the music video at the start however was that we lacked a lot of band footage, due to instruments bieng quite difficult to get so we fixed this by doing the instruments in all different places, this however did go slightly against convention as bands are most often shown together in at least a few shots. So because of this the video was more experimental, it worked out well, mainly because we made it very obvious that all the musicians were in completely different places. However we still would’ve prefered to have had all the musicians together rather than done it this strange way.

When it came to creating all of our media products there were a lot of incredibly useful new technologies available to help, not only in the research but the planning and the research.
Obviously the blog was incredibly helpful for recording our thought processes and the label clouds that are used were also helpful for organising and finding pieces of information when we needed them.
When it came to research, of course the internet was useful, we used it to find a lot of existing examples of videos of other bands (Hence the inspired videos) and collecting the images of other bands album covers and magazine adverts. When searching for the album images we mainly chose bands who worked in a similar genre to the genre of music we were doing, and so we picked heavy, rock bands or singers such as; Avenged sevenfold, Bullet for my Valentine, 3 Days grace, Nana Kitade and even very heavy bands like dying fetus. So working in a similar genre helped as we used styles inspired by a lot of these covers.
It also helped in finding photoshop tutorials, there are a lot of tutorials for photoshop that show you how to do all sorts of amazing effects, one of which we used in our Digipak in order to make the fire orb effect in the girls hands.
Photoshop was the most useful program of all, it was helpful in creating all sorts of effects for the Digipak and Magazines advert as well as drawing over the stills from the video to create a cartooned effect, as well as all the fonts available on photoshop. It was great for the research and collecting images together, and testing out effects found on photoshop tutorials.
When editing the video the only program we used was Final cut express. Final cut is a good program for editing, far superior to other editing programs like Windows Movie maker. Final cut is very good for detailed editing and all sorts of effects that work in a very similar way to photoshop, such as the adjustment of the brightness and contrast and even filters that can be found on it are quite similar to those on photoshop. Before we started the video we tested some of the effects available on final cut, although we tested quite a few of them we decided not to use any in the final video, mainly because most of them looked quite cheesy. However had we been doing an indie style video some of the effects we’d tested, such as the cartooned version of a video, we might have used them but it didn’t fit with a rock video.
Final Cut was also used for the evaluation stage of our product, we created a DVD commentary type video that would be designed to go with the Digipak. We each edited our own section for the commentary, for my section I used mainly the fade and tween effects in final cut to show images or videos of our products to illustrate the points I made.
All the different media technologies and the influences from other bands are what have helped create and complete all the products of our Music video project. In the end I am quite happy with how our ancillary products turned out but I’ve always thought our music video could have been much better if we had had better footage.

Stephens evaluation

Music Video Evaluation

In our music video we tried to follow conventions of rock/metal music videos but this gave us a few problems. Firstly we had to film quite a lot in lesson times and around college because we had struggled to find time when we could all meet up and do it, also filming round college made our shots look less professional but we still tried to follow conventions of a rock video. The initial idea of ours was to go film the performance in vonnies outhouse at the bottom of her garden but none of us could find a time when we could all arrange to go because of people having work or other commitments, I feel that if we had have been able to find time to do this I think our video would have looked much more professional and would have been easier to make it look like a rock/metal video.

Our narrative part of our media performance was preparing for a fight scene, this was hard to make to follow conventions due to us filming quite a lot of it in the gym which doesn’t look very gothic or follow convention in that sense. Our idea for the fight scene came through us trying to understand the words of the song through hearing because we couldn’t find any of the lyrics on the internet or on the main website of the band, so we had to figure them out and try grasp a meaning on the song ourselves.

Our first idea for the fight scene would be to have me training for a fight scene but not actually punching someone at the end because we thought it would be better to have the audience of the music video be guessing what happened after but we decided to put it in there for extra effect. I think our video follows conventions quite well because of some of the band shots look gothic and dark and follow conventions of real media music videos.

Our music video, digipak and poster went well together because the music video looks like a rock/metal video and the digipak and poster reinforce the same ideas, like with the creative flame animations and the darkness of the background on the digipak and poster both link in together with the our music video, you would normally associate flames and darkness with the rock/metal genre.

We took a lot of inspiration from other bands CD covers like bullet for my valentine and our actual band we got the song from anti social burn-outs. They’re look like they belong in a rock/metal band due to dark makeup, clothes, hair, etc. On our digipak we got stills from our music video and animated them to look cartoony and like the album cover of bullet for my valentine we thought this looked good so we decided to make it, however we did add flames to the guitars to add extra effect and to follow the conventions of the rock/metal genre.





Our audience feedback was very encouraging in the fact that we had a lot of good comments about our digipak and poster, we are happy to have received these comments because as we know that our music video wasn’t as good as it could have been so we put extra effort into making our digipak and poster as good as possible by vonnie using her strong Photoshop skills to create a digipak and poster which look very professional.

We got some feedback on our music video saying that it was very good due to the unfortunate circumstances we ran into when preparing to film our performance part of the music video; this was very unlucky for us because our initial ideas were a lot better that what was the actual outcome. The audience feedback we got gave us confidence that we did a good digipak and poster this was essential for us because we wanted to make this as strong as we possibly could.

In our music video we used a wide range of media technologies in the constructions and research, planning and evaluation stages. The main computer program we used was final cut, this was used to edit all the bits of footage we gathered filming and we were able to put effects on clips; we were going to put some effects on our clips but we decided not to because we thoughts it made the music video look cheap, less professional and fit less into our music video genre so we thought it would be a good idea not to use them.



We spent a lot of time on final cut trying to green screen as we would be able to make training scenes look much more professional by putting me in better training locations but again we had trouble with making this look good due to creases in the green material which made it hard for us to delete the green out of the frame when we were editing it so we got some green card which has no creases in it so it would work properly. Then the next problem with green screening was making it look real because I had to run on the spot and it was quite obvious, when we deleted the green and put a background under me, that it didn’t look real so we thought not to use that because it would look less professional and very cheep. So them we tried to green screen while I was running on the treadmill in the gym but this was extremely difficult to do so we decided not to do this.

The internet played a key roll in our music video we got lots of inspiration from other bands websites and MySpace accounts for the performance part of our music video. We went on the bands whose song we were covering and got lots of ideas on our music video from this like when vonnie and James are playing guitars.

Again the internet was very helpful but not for the performance but the narrative this time. We went on YouTube and looked at fight scenes in movies and music videos and we found some good ones of never back down, rocky and snake in the eagles shadow, these were a great help for us when we were planning our fight sequences and what to do, like practicing punching was a main part of this seeing as I was preparing for a big momentous fight.



We used photoshop to make our digipak and poster we needed to use photoshop because it has amazing tools which we needed to make pictures that look professionally made the digipak template was also on photoshop and we had a some spare time after making it so we decided to make our blog look better by putting a 3D picture of out digipak on there.

Lukes Evaluation

Media Evaluation Essay

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

One way in which conventions are challenged in our music video is that the locations of the video change quite frequently and seemingly at random. I think this is unusual to most music videos including rock. In the video we ‘the group’ performed the roles of different band members. We did not look as though we should really be in the video because it’s a rock genre; you would expect the band to be wearing dark clothes, gothic, punky styled. We were not wearing clothes anything like this, our everyday clothes were worn (jeans, normal t-shirt, hoodies etc).

Each band member was shot separately in different locations. These were the two guitarists, drummer and singer. This is not the usual way as far as rock music videos go. Many rock music videos were watched during our project for inspiration and ideas; I didn’t see one video that didn’t have a shot of the whole band together at one point, and very rarely would you see one band member on their own for too longer time. In our video you never saw the whole band together playing at the same time, you would only see the band members playing on there own in different locations. This means our video is very different in this way in comparison to the majority of music videos in the same or similar genre.

From our video you would think the target audience would be anyone from the ages of roughly 13 to 25 maybe 30 years of age. If you just listened to the music you would predict that the video to it would be in your face, dark and gothic. This would follow the normal forms of rock genre music videos unlike ours and would target the same sort of aged audience except maybe a bit older than 13, probably 15 years would be the youngest of the target audience.

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

Our digipack goes very well with the video and song. From the lyrics we could make out, understand and make sense of someone was very angry, preparing for a fight or confrontation of some sort. For example some of the lyrics are ‘break free flight fight tonight’. This is represented well with the red, orange and yellow flames all around the digipack. It shows aggression, passion and anger as does the lyrics and tone of the song.

The front cover of the digipack is very simplistic with just an image of a face, a pair of hands and a flame. Its very uncomplicated but in its simplicity extremely good. Inspiration for the digipack was other rock album cover such as ACDC – Those about to rock and Pink Floyd – The Wall.

The darkness of the digipack compliments the main product. The song has a dark gothic feel to it but also anger, passion and emotion. I think a fiery flame with a black background is the perfect way to get all these sorts of feelings across.

On the other if you were to see the digipack before seeing the video you would expect a different type of video. You would expect an in your face, aggressive performance based video which is very different to what ours is.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

There was very little feedback from the audience but what they did say was that the video was good, well edited and followed the conventions well. We basically learnt from this that we could edit clips to make a reasonable video and follow the conventions of the rock genre. I would have to disagree with the comment of we followed the conventions well in some ways we followed the conventions but I think that we didn’t follow the conventions in more ways.

The audience also said that the digipack was excellent and followed the conventions perfectly. I think that from this comment you can learn that you can promote a music video well to fit the conventions with good ancillary products alongside the main product. This could help attract people who are into the genre but haven’t heard the music to buy the product.

One comment of feedback we received was that the locations could have been changed to places outside of the college or our homes to a different place to fit the conventions more. For example we could have set the video in a cemetery or church. From this I can learn that to make your video more interesting and fit the typical conventions you could be more adventurous and creative with locations for the video.

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

Our whole video was edited and put together in Final Cut Express. All the different long clips of performance and narrative were cut up and mixed together to make a more fluent, interesting, and watchable video. If we couldn’t cut each shot up the video would be much more boring and longwinded and much less interesting to watch. We also experimented with different effects such as green screening, slow motion, black and white cartoon and distorted effect. All of these effects worked well but didn’t make our video fit the conventions of a rock genre any more and just would have looked a bit odd.

We also used the internet a lot during our project. We created a blog to record what we done each lesson. Also our ideas, inspirations and effects experiments were recorded in our blog so that you could see how we got to our final piece of work. Problems and how we overcame them were also recorded on the blog.

We also used Photoshop to create our digipack. On the programme you can get a stencil plan of a fold out digipack which was very useful and much easier to play about with different pictures and make it as easy on the eye as possible. We also used Photoshop to try out different effects you could put on pictures to make them fit the genre conventions. However the one we attempted were very hard to do and didn’t work as well as we hoped.

Thursday 10 December 2009

Dvd commentary - vonnie


Publish once finished please

Friday 27 November 2009

3D Digipak


3 dimensional version of the Digipak

Digipak Completed


The final Digipak. I've marked where the Cd should go on one of the panels.

Thursday 26 November 2009

Magazine Advert


I used the same cover as for the Digipak in order for it to be recognized, when seen the shops. I also included the website for the actual band as a lot of adverts in magazines do to gain more information on the band.
Done in photoshop.

Digipak So far

Tuesday 24 November 2009

The digipak so far


This is the design we have for the digipak's front cover at the moment. Bieng quite a heavy band (we kept the same band name) I opted for a dark cover and the fire shows the heavier side to it.
This was done by using images and drawing over them to create the effect, I may retake some photos to use for this specifically as the hands were an image from the internet.
The font is in white to stand out and I used a motion blur on a duplicate of the layer to create the glow effect.
The cover is meant to be nice and simple but with high contrast to draw attention. An interesting effect was having the skin of the woman be quite lowly saturated but having the nails and lips a bright red to imply a seductive side to her. Although the girl herself has little to do with the band (apart from there bieng a girl in it) it makes for an interesting and creepy front.

Friday 20 November 2009

Digipak

We have decided to do a digi pak instead of a DVD cover as it is easier and better in terms of research. Reffering to the moodboard from earlier I think we might try a style like that of bullet for my valentine as it works with the genre of music and looks very good.
The digipak will list:
several songs,
A music video,
and a behind the scenes piece
as what is to go in it.

I will probably use dark colours like blacks and red but with a high contrast.

Tuesday 17 November 2009

Music video (Final Cut)

It's finally done. We decided against effects in the end as they often look tacky but the lighting in some scenes definitely helped and made it far more interesting.

Video

Over the weekend Vonnie managed to get the bass and lead guitar footage over the weekend. Vonnie performed the bass guitar and a friend of Vonnie's (James) performed the lead guitar. We now have a suitable amount of footage to put together the video with a good amount of performance and narrative.

Friday 13 November 2009

Similar style music video by Rise Against

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Rough Cut (No Performance)



The Video so far, no performance

Problems

There is a huge problem with the performance aspect of our music video, because the music department won't let us use any of their equipment (We have been trying for over a week but they keep telling us that the person who gives permission isn't there)
We can try to use our own but finding people who can and will play drums is difficult and not only that finding drum kits themselves are very difficult. We would just not use drums but the drum line in the song is too heavy to just be ignored.
Guitars aren't the hardest thing to get, the only problem is the drums. The only person we can ask to borrow the drum kit from might say no so we don't know what we're gonna do if it doesn't work.

Friday 6 November 2009

panning

We were unable to book instruments to borrow from the music department as the head of music is only part time and wasnt in. On Monday she is supposed to in and we will then hopefully be able to use the instruments on the monday morning and record the performance part.

Today as we couldnt film the performance we just did some simple panning shots to use in the green screen part of the music video. We have some good shots for the narrative part of the video. These include stephen training for a fight , lifting weights , running and sparring. We also have a shot of the start of the fight where the first punch is thrown.

Tuesday 3 November 2009

attempting green screening

We attempted to use Stephen running on the spot in front of green material but we didn't think it looked very good because of the creases in the material. we also tried to use the material with Stephen running on a treadmill but this was too hard to cover the treadmill with the green. Next lesson we are going to try and use green card which will hopefully be much easier to hide the treadmill and have less creases.

Thursday 22 October 2009

Album cover ideas






An idea we had for our album cover was an image of a fiery skull, which unfortunately didn't turn out as we had hoped. Weirdly the image turned out blue on here though its suppose to be red fire -_-. Our picture was based off an image we found on psd.tutsplus.com (pictured left).

Add Image

Tuesday 20 October 2009

Problems

Because we have essentially no footage the editing is rather sparce and there is little that can be done at this time.

Final cut Effects


Some test footage where we had a look at different effects that could be used.

Sunday 18 October 2009


A short animation I did over every individual frame of a short video of me on macromedia flash, this looks cool and works well and is an effect that could be used in our video.

Tuesday 13 October 2009

ideas

An idea me [luke] and josh had was Stephan [as he volunteered at the start of the project- which we're holding him to] to be the main chararcter in the narrative preparing for a fight, and as Vonnie is the only female in the group it makes sense for her to be the girlfriend/partner trying to stop him going. Because we dont know alot of the words of the song me and josh would perhaps be guitar and drum players which would be more focused on than the main singer.

Further planning

We are struggling to find all the instruments for our music video and actual instrument players to be in the film: because of this we are thinking that it would maybe be a better idea to do much more of a narrative film which we could be in ourselves which will make it less complicated to put together.

We are probably going to show a male preparing for a fight of some sort a different locations with certain lyrics being used as pointers on how the person in the video is going to act. We do not have a solid idea exactly of what we are going to do but when the whole group is together and with the help of Vonnies first draft story board we are confident we will be able to put together a decent enough music video.

Monday 12 October 2009

Problems with filming.

Because Vonnie was busy on sunday and the others were busy on saturday, the camera was given to Stephen, Luke and Josh to film parts of the music video that they could over the weekend.

More photoshop effects


More photoshop effects. attempted using this tutorial - http://www.developertutorials.com/blog/design/photoshop-design/creating-energy-spheres-in-photoshop-119/

Wednesday 7 October 2009

Possible Location for the Performance parts


Some photos of the outbuilding of my house which could make an interesting studio for the performance part of the video.

Photos of the lighting equipment we have.

Tuesday 6 October 2009

Photoshop Effects 2


An attempt at copying the fire hair effect on photoshop, using the same tutorial and photos from flickr. Works really well and was rather easy to do and remember.

Monday 5 October 2009

A study of Jonas Akerlund

Jonas Akerlund is most well known for his music videos having made successful music videos for people such as Madonna, Pink, Lady Ga Ga, The prodigy etc.

He started as a member of a Swedish black metal band and directed his first music video in 1988 (Bewitched – Candlemass) and in 1998 he directed his first big hit (Ray of light – Madonna), which won the 1999 grammy award for best short form music video.

Recently he has moved away from music and is starting to make it as a film director, his first film being an independent film called Spun (2002) a film shot in 22 days. His film works are few and far apart so he still makes music videos.

Jonas Akerlunds more recent videos seem to often have a dark subject matter along with dark/low key Mise en scene. He also has a tendency to mix very surreal imagery into scenes with realism. In the smashing pumpkins video Try, try, try the subject matter is the sad truth of the effects of drugs addiction on life and love but an incredibly trippy surreal scene is added in during a drug trip. The video for Sober (P!nk) shows scenes of a party which aren’t particularly unique but the images and scenes of Pink with herself that are put in are surreal in a more subtle way. The video for Paparazzi (Lady Ga Ga) also follows the dark subject matter of murder but instead of adding surreal scenes the scenes are presented in a very surreal way.

Jonas Akerlund seems to use the theme of drug abuse a lot, or as a main focus. In Try, try, try the main theme is drug abuse and he produced a short film based on this video. His other film Spun is also a film that focuses on drugs (Methamphetamine.) Another, more broad theme, is vices, desires (drugs, sexual desires and indulgences). As seen in quite a few of his videos all different sins appear (lust the most common), Paparazzi shows lust, greed, envy and wrath.

In terms of Mise en scene one aspect that seems to appear a lot is the make up on the eyes, the eyes quite often stand out on the female actresses/singer, examples of this are in Papparazzi, Sober, I miss you (Blink 182) and Try, try, try. The eye makeup is often very heavy and on paler women or background it contrasts well and really stands out.

The lipstick style has appeared a few times as well, where the women have had lipstick that is in a very definitive shape that doesn’t match their actual lips.

The lighting is quite often very dark and not very colourful, although in Try, try, try it is just dull colours that become very bright in the drug trip scene. The women in the video are also portrayed as very pale so there is a lot of contrast. In Sober, Pink wear’s white underwear as she isn’t particularly pale. The women are also highly sexualized as is a common theme of music videos, and lesbianism and bisexuality tend to feature heavily.

The video for Try, try, try is very conventional of the music type itself. The music has quite a sad and slow tone and so the shots are quite long and the movement within the scenes is quite slow, it’s not filled with action, the one sort of fight scene is very dreary and they characters move like they are drunk. Toward the end it becomes more tense and speeds up as the music’s beat and style speeds up slightly and this tension build up to the long slow scene at the end as the music fades away. The video also has shots of the lead singer singing to break away from the story, this is another very common convention of music videos. Because he is the main star of the band the video shows only him and the shots are very often close ups to promote him, even images of himself overlap others.

The relationship between the lyrics and visuals is quite subtle, in that the video shows the love between the characters and the lyrics talk about love, but there is a part where the lyrics say ‘try to hold on’ and the male character takes a pill in his hand and holds it.

Although the female character isn’t as strongly sexualized as they usually are in his videos, there is the implication that the girl was selling herself as a prostitute when the car come by them and she gets in. However the sexualisation was not what they were trying to promote in the video so this is most likely why it doesn’t feature heavily.

The makeup on the girl is quite heavy despite they’re very poor circumstances, and at the beginning she is shown applying eyeliner, again showing the focus on Jonas Akerlund’s use of makeup and his focus on eyes. During the scene the girl is imagining the shots cut back to her eyes.

The video for Lady Ga Ga’s Paparazzi shows a lot of relationship between the lyrics and the imagery, for instance saying ‘snap, snap.’ And the camera angle changing to match the beat of it whilst being very short shots makes it look like camera shots. The use of reporters and paparazzi type figures at the end also fits with the whole video.

The whole thing is promoting Lady Ga Ga and so therefore almost the entire video is always her. There are lot’s of close ups featured, as very short constantly changing shots in order to match the way a camera takes photos from lot’s of different angles very quickly.

The entire video is incredibly sexualized, with the scene of what is a sort of orgy, this mirrors the way she is shown to be much less in control of a sexual situation at the beginning, in comparison here she seems very in control as everyone is pleasuring her, catering to her whims (lust), as well as how when she is using crutches she is also in a very skimpy outfit. The way she seems to (as implied) kill all these other women shows her general control and wrath. The theme of voyeurism is also very strong in the way they show Lady Ga Ga being watched and photos taken of her.

The video uses quite bright colouring, which for the whole video is unconventional of Jonas Akerlund. But the surreal and dark tones of the video fits more to his style. There are quite often very short flashes of strange and scary images during the video. Mostly to the corpses of dead women, all killed differently, this makes the video seem much darker compared to the rather upbeat music and brightly coloured scenes.
There is a lot of use of contrast and black and white, with the makeup for one, and in the costumes. Examples are the white and dark blue suit, and the black latex outfit that contrasts with her skin, similar to how her hair, skin and eyes contrast.
At one point the video starts showing flashing images of Dalmations (black and white) this is a tad strange, but after you see a maid walk in to a room wearing black and white showing how she is meant to be nothing but a lowly dog that’s in the way to Lady Ga Ga’s character.

Jonas Akerlund’s use of surreal and dark themes is particularly interesting and his videos are very effective in cause an emotional response in the audience.

Friday 2 October 2009

Photoshop effects.

http://speckyboy.com/2009/02/25/28-incredible-photoshop-image-manipulation-techniques-and-tutorials/
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/41-nicest-photoshop-photo-effects-photoshop-tutorials/
- These two sites have some fantastic effects tutorials that we could use. The dripping pencils one is personally one of my favorites that would make a fantastic result if done much darker. (Some examples with effects I particularly liked)

Roots Manuva - Witness The Fitness

This video is more inspiration for our music video , although its sort of a comedy it fits in with our video type of preparing for a fight scene.

Never Back Down fight scene - ideas

This is a fight scene from the popular film never back down, the main thing we noticed was that the music in the background was very similar to our song. This is good inspiration for our music video because in it their may be a small fight scene.

Mood Boards


I've done two moodboards. one with elements that look more suitable to the video, stereotypical imagery to this style and example shots from other videos.


The second features mainly album cover examples of bands I was reminded of while listening to No looking Back. Two of the images however are posters for Bullet for my Valentine and Avenged sevenfold. These were the album covers that looked do able by us or had elements we could use. Some of them are nice and simple like 3 days grace's 'One-X' others have a very cool effect that could be done quite easily if based on a photo like the two Bullet for my valentine posters.
A lot of the album covers have very interesting text as well, this could give us some examples of how the text/logo for Anti-Social Burnouts could look.

Thursday 1 October 2009

Fighting film examples


One of the most well known scenes from a fighting film, used in intertextual references all the time, some small elements from this would be interesting and even reveal more about the plot. (Rocky Balboa, ~Rocky 6)


The trailer features some scenes from the film with elements we could or were going to use. Like the waking up from bed, the walking down a street while the camera moves away. (Trailer for fighting)

Pitch

As far as we can tell with the lyrics for 'No looking back' the song appears to be about fighting or a fight, so this is something to be brought in to our narrative.
The video will, hopefully, be a cross between performance and narrative. It was the video for Animal I have Become that inspired the idea to start with the main character (most likely the lead singer) waking up and preparing for a fight, by training or just simple things like getting dressed.

One piece of the lyrics we were able to decipher was 'Nothing is left, a crack through the heart, I am strong and I won't be torn apart.' at this point we could show the characters girlfriend attempting to stop him but him pushing her away, then leaving her alone to go to the fight. Some emotion on her part could be particularly effective.

The performance parts would have a lot of movement and would most likely have to be gone through several times. As a location I have a room in my outbuilding that, if cleaned out, would make a good stage and my mother has a lot of lighting equipment, the room is small but will contrast to the narrative which would most likely be outside a lot. My father has a few guitars he may let us use also, plus I have a friend who plays drums and has his own.

Though most of the video would lead up to the fight at the end I think it'd be more effective for the video to end just before the first punch is thrown, with an inter splitting at some point of the performers throwing down they're instruments to show they've finished.

We could include some intertextuality from other films which involve fights, well known scenes like rocky or fight club. For example (Though we may not use it) Running up a large set of stairs as training.
The beginning of the video could start with an alarm going off and being turned off then going into the performance as the music get heavier, or show them preparing while the drum beat is on.

Tuesday 29 September 2009

Examples

Animal I have become has a similar music style (though not as heavy). An example of a video that has elements that would be useful. The dark red background for the place where the band plays is dark and something like that would work well. The way that the story plays out (starting in morning going through a day) is a good idea for how to possible work our narrative. The way the camera moves and the cuts between shots is another thing we could use, the slower movement in the shots but short duration shots works well.

Thursday 24 September 2009

No looking back

The final choice for the song we want to do. A video with a similar genre and that is done in a way that we might like to do it is Animals by nickelback:



Although little other than this one setting are shown it uses good camera shots that move a lot and the way the artists look and dress is nice and simple so as not to call attention to it.




Another music video with good effect and style is Paramore's 'Misery business' The video shows a lot of shots of the band and they're all very quick and move around a lot. Quite often the camera suddenly changes and will show shots upside down or have black and white shots quickly. this give a unique and fast paced effect which is something that could also work well in our video.

Tuesday 22 September 2009

message to artist of our song

Hello

We are at Long Road Sixth Form College and as part of a media studies project have chosen to use your song 'No Looking Back' for a music video.
At a long shot, if you are in cambridge at the moment or anytime soon, would you consider starring in our video?
If not could you provide us with some lyrics and maybe some ideas of how you would like the video to be.

Thankyou for your time.

Josh
Luke
Stephen
Vonnie

CD

The songs we have chosen as our top three choices from the CD are as follows:

No looking back - Anti-social Burn-outs

Wicked game - Basboosa

Girls on T.V - Be your own PET

The three songs are all completely different and could potentially be done in interesting ways.

No Looking back
Would have to involve a lot of band footage, them playing, there could be a narrative but it'd more likely just be the band playing. maybe in different places.
The song reminded me of Animals by Nickelback so a similar effect could be achieved (though hoping for something more interesting, as that video is very plain and could have used more shots)
Although it is highly unlikely the band are from Cambridge and we can attempt to contact them to find out if they would be consider being in the video.
I imagine it'd use dark colours and the actors would wear goth or punk style clothes. perhaps heavy makeup (similar to the band themselves)
The shots would be fast and/or move around a lot and quite quickly.

Wicked game
The style of the song is very sweet and sad. The song had a style similar to hallelujah (rufus wrainright) and sounded angelic, so I imagined very soft lighting, quite light but in a dark/dull room. the main colours bieng white blue and dark grey. In contrast to the previous one, this would have longer slower shots, less movement but perhaps long panning.
The girl in the video could wear something quite elegant and very light.
Lyrics: http://www.sweetslyrics.com/442399.Bassboosa%20-%20Wicked%20Game.html

Girls on T.V
The third option is reminiscent of Paramore, or that is how I imagine the main singer to look. very punky with a unique style, maybe even slightly 80s style. Like 'No looking back' it could have quick moving and short duration shots. there is more chance of involving a narrative in this video.

Wednesday 10 June 2009

Welcome

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