Feedback

Well done with the posting this week - try to see if you can add more detail next week, particularly with the editing process and evaluation on the CD digipak.  Try to focus on the academic evaluation of your blog, move on from reporting problems that your group have had.

Progress Update

I have been off with the flu for a week now and I am not allowd to attend the second shoot day in the scrapyard which is really annoying! I have also found out that Nina is unable to attend aswell for some reason...therefore Teodora is the only group member who will be attending 

Research Into Poster Design

For our overall packaging of our band we have to include a poster design promoting Infernal. I have been researching possible designs from bands of a similar genre to Infernal (MOD).

Shoot Day 1 Account From Studio

We began the shoot day by all meeting in the studio at around 8.30 to setr up the equipment and lights. The cast then went to change into their costumes. I then did their makeup and hair. We as a group discussed Laura's makeup because we were unsure about what kind of effect we wanted on her eyes but agreed a simple smokey eye would be best with red lipstick and volumised hair. Whilst we were organising where the band should stand for their first shot and making sure the lighting was clear on the monitor the song played in the background for about 15 minutes so the band members could check they knew their words and chords.

(Above is a photo of the scrapyard). 
At around 9.30 we began shooting with a wideshot of the band. Soon after roling the camera we spotted that the lighting on the faces of the band members was slightly shadowed, which would make no sense when we have the scrapyard shots on the green screen. To overcome this problem we decided to use lighting strobes to give the illusion of daylight. We carried on shooting till we broke for lunch at 1. Over lunch we discussed possible shots we could include for extra diversity.

(A shot list of all the shots that went wrong and well).

During the last half of our shoot day we were moving different parts of our set around and shooting from different angles etc to get some more interesting shots. At one point I noticed that there was a spider crawling across the camera in the middle of a shot! Over the course of the day Teodora was filming shots, Nina was writing a account of each shot and I was in charge of taking photos and playback. I was really happy with the way we came together as a group and how our cast members looked on camera. I think it was a great sucess and I'm looking forward to shooting in the scrapyard in a coouple of weeks time!! 

Casting Problems

On the day before our shoot I arrived to the lesson to find my Group (Nina and Teodora) in a fluster! It turns out that the day of our shoot is the day of our bass guitar player Merlin's November Assesments! We have also found out that our drummer Will, is ill and therefore won't be able to shoot with us. Ed our forth member of our group is still not back so it was all a bit of a worry. We decided to have a brainstorm with the rest of our class to try and come up with some possible replacements. One idea was Jamie Parker, but we asked him and he said he had too much on. We also thought of Oscar Jackson as he is a really good drum player and in a band but he was already in too many!

We eventually decided to use Laura Cheese. Although she is a girl she used to play the drums and I think she will suit the band image. I also arranged with Merlin's media teacher that he could do one of his November Assesments the day before instead of the actual day of our shoot. It's taken a long time to sort out but I think we have cracked it. I'm very excited about shooting tomorrow! It should be fun, although I am quite nervous that the cast has their costumes and learnt their lyrics and chords to the song.

Progress Update

Teodora and I have come back from half term with a bit of a crisis, one of our group members has gone down with the chicken pox!!! Hopefully he will be well enough to shoot (which is in 10 days!) I also have just seen some of the props that I are going to be using in the studio with the greenscreen. They look really cool, especially the old mini. I also went to see Al in the theatre department to see if he had any of the remaining props we needed.

The Green Light From Jason!

After we finalised our cast members we had a meeting with Jason to check that all the cast members would be allowd to get permission from their subject teachers to be in the video. Will Bodnar-Horvath is the only cast member that we have an issue with due to the fact that he is already in quite a few other videos but if he gets a blue card it looks like we have the all clear!

Research-The Kinks Official Website

http://www.thekinks.info/

Copyright Permission For Track

To Universal Music Group,

We are a group of A Level students working on an A level project for a qualification in Media Studies. We are writing to request permission to use the following track as a part of this project:

I’m Not Like Everybody Else by The Kinks.

With your permission the track would be used as the accompaniment to a short form video that is made purely for assessment purposes and will have no commercial usage. The video will be viewed only by members of the school community and the assessor of the examination board.

The artist and the copyright holder will of course be fully recognised in the pre-production and evaluation material that accompanies the project. We can also include a full copyright notice if required both in the planning material and on the video itself.

Yours sincerely,

Charlotte Morgan, Nina Jakobsen, Edward Nightingale, Teodora Nguyen

Hurtwood House School.

Feedback

This is soundwork - there are evident clear accounts of your planning and research for your music video production day after half term. 
I like the way in which decision making is evident along with reflection and revisions, but this is somewhat descriptive rather than analytical at times, for example in discussion of Mise en scene and lighting which are important concepts in terms of the look that you want to promote. 
Your cast list has been agreed and you need to be working on the set design and organisation of production. You need to recognise work that other's have completed in your group and identify what you have done - do this with individual evaluation. 
Also try not to simply keep posting single images onto blog - use an online tool which helps display the images such as Flickr.

Please make sure that you share resources but not evaluation work - which should be an individual effort.  Well done.

Lighting And Set Feedback From Dan

We recorded Dan's feedback and other suggestions for our music video:

He thought we should go with the idea of doing a more natural lighting to make it look like daylight and that we are actually recreating the scrap yard that we are filming the narrative. So instead of doing a performance based lighting we are trying to get a more natural feel to it though we're still using a back and a key light in the shot. Dan also agreed on the choice of colours; metal grey and darker blue and thought that the idea of getting a bright colour on the vechicle in the background would fit really well.

Cast List

During the last couple of days we  have been deciding on who to cast as the band members of Infernal. We were thinking about the star image that we wanted and who would fit well together. We also needed to take into consideration who could actulary realistically play instruments.

LEAD SINGER: Phillip Von Drechsel




BASS GUITAR: Merlin Talard




ELECTRIC GUITAR: Tom Evans




DRUMS: Will Bodnar-Horvath

Set Design

Lighting

• Natural lighting.
• Key light that gives a "theatrical effect".
• Light is coming from a high angle dirrectly onto the band performing.
• Back light so the effect is gentle on the background behind the band.

A Rough Sketch Of What We Want Our Set To Look Like





Colour Pallet:

• Metal grey.
• Black.
• White.
• Dark blue.
• Bright red to make the set pop.
• Smashed up car to get the realism of the junkyard.

Shooting Schedule

To be extra prepared we have to finishe a brief shooting schedule to know how the day might look and to know how little time we have in different location;

8:30 – Meeting at the studio with crew and cast informing about the day

8:45 – Costumes and make-up

9:00 – Set up the props

9:30 – Set up cameras and lighting

10:00 – Shoot starts – live performance shots
wide shots of band
close-up on all the different band members
high angle shot of the band
low angle shot of drummer
shot of drumer from behind
mid-shot on guitar and bass both together and separate
tracking shot around the lead singer

13:00 – Lunch Time

13:30 – Depart from school to scrap yard

13:45- Arrive at scrap yard

14:00 – Shots of scooter driving outside scrap yard and arriving there
Tracking shot
mid shot
close-up on driver
from above and behind see the scooter driving away

15:00 – Scooter in the scrap yard
point of view shot on scooter arriving at the junk yard

15:30 – Narrative shots – playing cards, shots in car, playing around
close-up on all the people playing card both separate and together
mid-shot on all the band members playing card together
close-up on card and poker chips
facial reactions close-up

17:30 – Girls running towards band creating a bit of kaos
point of view seeing girls approchinglong and mid shot
see the boys band members reacting on the girls approcing
close-up on girls getting exited
mid shot girls starting to run
long shot seeing the boys standing up starting to run the other way
Both the girls and boys in the same shot, long shot seeing the girls chasing the boys

18:00 – Back at school

Costume List 2

4 bowler hats:


4 pairs of black chinos:


4 skinny black ties:


4 pairs of Chelsea boots:


4 white collared shirts:





For girls perhaps mini dresses:










OVERALL COLOUR SCHEME FOR COSTUMES IS BLACK, WHITE AND GREY.

Research-Costume Ideas

Below is a selection of clothes for Auturm/Winter 11 on Topshop, themed specifically "New MOD", perhaps we could use these garments to come up with costume ideas for Infernal.


http://www.topshop.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CatalogNavigationSearchResultCmd?catalogId=33057&storeId=12556&langId=-1&viewAllFlag=false&categoryId=306994&interstitial=true&StartIndex=7

Evaluating The Animatic

The completion of our animatic only took an hour which I thought was quite good. We began by filming each individual image and then transferred every one onto Final Cut Pro. We then started to drag each shot onto the beat of the drum of the song. This enables the cuts to be in time with the music which makes the overall production look a lot slicker. Watching the animatic after it's completion I can see how the shots will work in partnership with the track and I'm really excited to see how different/similar our real music video will look in comparison to this.

  

Props List

Scrap metal:


Black stools:


Cigarettes:


Lighters:


Empty beer bottles:


Poker chips and cards:


Scooters:


Mircophones:


Amps:


Drum kit:


Bass guitar:


Electric guitar:


Cables and wires:

Finished Animatic

Here is the finished product of our storyboarding that we have now edited together.

By creating a storyboard for our music video we will clearly know what shots we want to use on our shot day, also if any key person would be missing we can always refer back to the storyboard to clearly know what we are suppose to be shooting. By the putting them together into a animatic's it gives us a group a preview of our finished product and if there is anything we see that we might be missing out on our that doesn't look as good as we thought we can take it out and replace it with something better.

Storyboarding.....

After pitching we started to storyboard our final ideas for the music video. Our ideas had to be slightly changed after the pitching process due to location and health and safety difficulties but the main concept is still pretty similar.









Below is the final storyboard cut out into 140 shots and arranged in the order that will be shot on final cut pro...

The Pitch

The Pitch

View more presentations from hurtwoodhousemedia5.

Research - MOD Website

http://www.modculture.co.uk/

Current Artists Album Covers That I Drew Inspiration From

During a lesson we were asked to think of designs for our bands album cover. I decided to look through my iPhone to get some inspiration. The artists who's album cover's I have looked at have no relevance to the band's genre of music. This was just for some ideas.




Mark Ronson


I really like the colours used in this album cover, combining the ripped paper effect collaged with the artists name and a photo of the artist.



Plan B


Maybe using some graffeti on a wall would be quite cool and indicate the band's rebellious side.



Naughty By Nature


I quite like the way the artists are standing on rubble with a "don't give a shit" appearance. This could relate with the music video in the junkyard. So maybe we could take a screen grab of them standing on junk with attitude.





I think the combination of the ripped wallpaper effect, writing on the wall and attitudial pose in the junkyard would be a cool album cover for Infernal.

Digipack Covers Used By Artists Of A Similar Genre

From the album covers above it is clear that the Britsh flag colours are a common choice for the font colour or clothing. The colours also indicate the MOD symbol. I think that from these elements the artists are interested in patriotic subjects. This research has got me thinking about Infernal's album cover and what relevent images, font and colour I could use to summarise, expose the band.

What Institution Would Sign Our Band

I would say that Infernal would be signed to one of the larger majors such as BMG. Our band seems to be more focused on the creativity of the album rather than the image. By signing to the subsidiary the band will recieve creative support from the record company whether it be in the form of studio time, music video promotion etc. 

The Music Industry - The Majors

The music industry is dominated by 4 major companies:

• EMI
• Universal
• Warner Music
• Song BMG

Each major owns a smaller collection of record labels and each label has a roll-call of artists who have signed a recording contract.


Example
Universal Music is made up of record labels such as:








Within these labels the Universal Music Group have signed Blink-182, Bon Jovi, Dr Dre, Eminem, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, U2, The Hives, Scissor Sisters and Snow Patrol (to name but a few!).

They also own the back-catalogies of artists ranging from Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, The Supremes, The Who and Buddy Holly.

Our Target Audience

TRENDIES-crave the attension and admiration of their peers









INNOVATORS-they wish to make their mark












REBELS-wish to remake the world in their own image









DROP-OUTS-who shun commitment of any kind









CYNICS-have to have something to complain about