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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.