Final Draft- ITS FINISHED

This is it. James Couleur's final music video to his single 'My Face'. After many hours of filming, editing and tough decisions as to what shots we thing look best, and where they look the best in the video we came to this. The final edit of James Couleurs debut single and video 'My Face'
Enjoy!!

Evaluation Question 1-In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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

Research
At the very start of the task to create a music video we obviously had choose our song that we were going to make a video of. Our choice was Bastille's single 'These Streets'. From this we had to carry out some research into the music genre that Bastille, and what the music genre has to offer in terms of their music videos.

The first artists we looked at made music in the same music genre as Bastille. We found out that Bastille were an indie rock band, however from the very outset, we decided that we wanted to have a solo artist. Taking all this into account we then searched for solo indie rock artists and came across Ed Sheeran, Ben Howard and James Blake.

From looking into these three artist we found out that in indie solo music videos there is a lot of focus on the artist. So from this we knew that the artist that we were going to create needed to be on screen for a lot of the music video. Taking Andrew Goodwin's performance theory into account.

One thing we found out about indie music videos in comparison to the pop industry or dance industry music videos is that there is very little male or female faze as you can see in these gifs below.

Above you see snapshots from the dance and pop songs, 'Call on me', 'Mysterious Girl' and 'Getting Heavy' As you can see it is exploiting males and females in a sexual way, enticing males and females to watch the video, following the female and male gaze rule. 

Above you see another gif. This gif was made by taking screenshots from Ben Howard's single 'The Wolves'. As you can see there is a strong focus on Ben Howard performing his single. Following the theory of performance in music videos. Andrew Goodwin came up with a theory about music videos. This was that music videos either have a concept, narrative, or performance theme. The gif above clearly shows a performance aspect.

We then wanted our music video to use but also challenge the results of our research that we found. As James Couleur, the artist that we came up with, was an indie rock solo artist, we wanted to take ideas from some of the videos that we saw. However we also wanted to add our unique touch to the video, challenging the convention of solo indie rock artists and their music videos that they produce. To do this we had thought long and hard about what to include. In the end we came up with the idea of incorporating a paint party scene, and building our video around this idea. In dance videos you often see the use of bright, vibrant, bold colours. They are used in their music video to really get the dance nature and vibe across of the song. This is how we believe that we have challenged the genre of our the music genre indie rock, by using something that you will usually see and associate with dance videos in our indie rock song. I will show you this in the gifs you see below.

So above you can see pictures that I screen-grabbed from 'Avicii's' single 'These Days'. This is how we wanted to challenge our conventional indie genre. By creating our own images of these we were able to challenge the genre in our music video, which you'll be able to see in the gif below.

Here we have some images from James Couleurs single 'My Face'. You can see from this gif that we aimed to get the colour and paint theme into it, and it payed off. When we evaluated the video as a class, the feedback about the paint being thrown against the wall, and the paint party was really positive. As well as liking the shots they also said how it really went well with the video, just proving that with the indie rock genre, we were able to take ideas from the dance genre and incorporate this into our video, challenging the conventions of indie music videos, but coming out with a successful end product.

However as well as challenging the indie conventions of we also wanted to take some of the techniques or shots they use in their music videos and create our own shots of these. When researching into indie solo artists as I said we came across Ben Howard. I would say that he was the most influential as we yet again used his video for 'Keep Your Head Up' as inspiration for our music video. This video was driven with magnificent nature shots which were eye-capturing and something we wanted to use in our video. Here are some images from Ben Howard's single below.

As you can see above Ben Howard's video for 'Keep Your Head Up' that its filled with different nature shots, at different times in the day, capturing the sun setting and rising, with lots of other stunning pictures throughout the video. Even though you see that there is a main focus on the setting and the nature surroundings, you still see Ben Howard in the video. However you don't see him singing along to the music. We wanted to take the ideas of the nature shots and also show James Couleur, but we wanted to, and also needed to show James Couleur singing, meeting the lip syncing criteria. Below you can see some shots from our video.

From this gif you can see that we aimed to get in some stunning nature shots, but as well as this incorporating James Couleur into the video as much as we can, showing a narrative theme to our music video, which I will explain about this later. We traveled to Goldhanger in Maldon to get these beautiful shots. When we showed our video to the class for peer feedback we got some really positive comments about these shots. They loved the close up shot, with the locket in James Couleur's hand looking out on the glistening sea, with the sun setting on the horizon. We were really pleased about this feedback because, we shot this specific shot multiple times, just waiting for the right time where the sea was glistening in full effect, so It was nice to know that our hard work and dedication was noticed.

Andrew Goodwin

Andrew Goodwin's theory says that music videos fit into three categories; Narrative, Concept and Performance.

A narrative video is one which tells a story, The Gif below shows Walk Off The earth's Video 'Gang Of Rhythm' this is a music video where the band plays the role of a gang escaping from prison. The narrative is clearly shown in the music video though the use of costume and the characterization.

A Concept video is very different from a narrative music video. This style of video doesn't follow a direct story line and often contains abstract elements such as stylized movements or objectifying elements. There is also often elements that include parts of the song within the video, or the lyrics and the video have a direct collation.

A performance video  is a video that is based around a band performing or a solo artist singing. This type of music video is more commonly found in videos for a band as the video will focus on the bands skills. 

James Couleur's My Face: Our music video is one that is hard to categorise, I would personally say that it doesn't have one category that it fits into. Our music video Contains elements of all three categories. The narrative category would be the one that we fit into the least, although our music video does show a journey that builds to the paint party at the end of the video. In terms of concept our video ticks the most  boxes. There is no story line and we also have elements of the song portrayed  within the video - The 'Mistakes' Wall is  evidence of this in our music video. we also have elements of stylized movements to represent the journey in our video. The performance element of the Video is only within the shots where our music video where James is walking towards the camera singing.

Carol Vernallis

Carol Vernallis' theories overlap with Andrew Goodwin's to a certain point. Carol's theory digest how a music video is created though the use of narrative, editing, camera movement and framing and diegesis. Where her theory differs from Andrew's is her ideas about cutting to the beat. Her ideas about cutting to the beat relate to our video. We are constantly cutting to the beat in our video where different parts of the song change. We also made sure that the tracking shots we filmed walked to the beat as well.

Digipak

Our digipak challenges real life media products as typical indie pop artists as the bright colours come through across all of our media products. Below you can see our digipak.

Our digipak shows a vast array of colours. We did this as we wanted to get the theme of indie and pop across to our audience. As you can see below, Coldplays front cover of their album for Mylo Xyloto.

The front of the Mylo Xyloto album is covered in colour. We used this as inspiration as we wanted to match the bright colours and the eye catching visuals. We believe that we achieved our aim to use eye catching visuals and colours to attract our audiences attention.

Website 

Our website challenges forms and conventions for real media products in different ways. You can see the home page of our website below.

Our website continues the theme of colour. As you can see by the background, we like to have products that stand out as we wanted to be individual and have unique ideas. If you look at Bastille's website, another inspiration for our group you will see that he has used lots of unique fonts and images associated to his name. I have put a screen shot below of Bastille's home page.

The triangle for the letter 'a' is shown throughout Bastille's work across song names, album names and in music videos. This can be automatically linked to the band and allows the audience to connect and acknowledge the band.

Evaluation Question 2

Here is question 2 of our evaluation. Click on the video to watch it being answered. I answered this question with the help and use of Adobe Premier Pro.

Evaluation Question 3- What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Question 4- How did you use media technology in your construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

We have advanced hugely from year 12. We have learnt to use more advanced features in Adobe Premiere Pro such as the ultra key which allowed us to use a green screen and replace the background with anything that we wanted to. We have also branched out from using Prezi and we have found another site which is called emaze (the one above). We also used Photobucket to upload pictures and to make mini albums to show off areas of our work which needed multiple pictures.

Year 13 also tested us by instead of having to make one video we also had to make a digipak and a website.

Above are the digipak and also the website. These challenged us as we had little knowledge in how to make a website and also a digipak. Luckily James Braddy was very good at using Adobe Photoshop so he was put in charge of the digipak. I was put in charge of the website as I had to create one for GCSE ICT. As you can see on the website there is a large Twitter feed and along the top there are links to other social sites. We had to set up our own social sites for James Couleur. We set up a YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

By making these social media accounts it helped to bring James Couleur to life and it also helped us to advertise our artist.

Digipak Progression

Above is photo-album containing all of the Digipak versions we have created. As the digipack has progressed so have my skills in using the photo editing software Photoshop. The changes were made on the back of practicalities and also from feed back we have received from our peers and also from teachers.

This is the progression from our first draft to our final draft for our Digipak. as you can see as skills have improved and feed back has been received. The first disk idea was to use the powdered paint image with text that is curved to the disk. this then progressed as an idea based on feedback to remove the large amount of colour overall in the digipak and thus wee took the colour out and re arranged the text with the addition of two black lines. We then decided to add the colour back into the disk as it stood out from the rest of the digipak.

The front cover only progressed twice as the idea to over lay the black rectangle with the powdered paint worked well, we then cut away 3 different sized lines and random intervals which gave two effects, the different sized coloured blocks and also the random sized black bars it created, the feedback we received for the new front cover was good.

Like the front cover the under the disk slide only took one transformation to make it into the final product. There were comments about this page looking out of place in the original digipak so we decided to overlay colours onto each of the guitars, this brought the slide into the digipak.However with rearranging the digipak this slide has become the inside cover.

This was the only slide of the digipak that we have kept the same from the first draft. the only change that was made was its location, this is now the under the disk slide.

Completed Digipak

Production Diary

Lesson 1: Today we found out our groups for our Music Video Task. We then started looking for music / songs that didn't have a music video to them already.

Lesson 2: today we started pulling together our ideas for our music videos. We have chosen our three songs with out a music video and Ben s is putting them into a power point to present to our class so that we can get feedback.

Lesson 3: Today we presented our three songs to our class and gained some feedback about each of our ideas. out of our three song ideas they preferred our third idea, saying how the second idea would be too complicated to do / too similar to previous ideas. They also made the comment on how the ideas for Bastille would have to be done first time as once there is mess there is no going back.

Lesson 4: Today we worked on our feedback and chose our final song, These Streets by Bastille we then started pulling in ideas and worked on a timeline
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Lesson 5: We drew inspiration for a powdered paint festival, inspired by the festival of love in India and also various videos online

Lesson 6: We added more to the story board today, we are having a constant flow of ideas so we decided just to draw them down and then cut out each scene and stitch them together.

Lesson 7: Today we had our song on constant repeat in class as we allocated shots to different parts of the song, we now have a storyboard that we have completed and allocated timings to each shot that we will try to stick to.

Lesson 8: Planning preparation for the powder festival including sourcing paint, mobile power options, reserving cameras and other recording equipment to make sure that we are prepared.

Lesson 9: Mass advertising around school fro our Paint party, we also spoke to groundsman who gave us the keys to the back fields where we are going to have the filming session.

Lesson 10: The Final countdown, Cameras were checked, the ground covering was also checked, its really sunny today should be a good shoot! absences recorded to collect Generator. We also split down the 20 Kg of powdered paint into handy bags so that it is easy to distribute and throw. We also sourced a MASSIVE speaker from music as well as an air blower for mass paint throwing. - The Paint party went really well, we now have about 20 students caked in powered paint, we have about 10 cameras and a go pro's worth of footage to sift though....

Lesson 11: With all the footage collected and stored safely onto the media computers, we have started sifting through the hours of footage and trimming different shots into an order that fits well and flows nicely.

Lesson 12: We continued to edit the collected footage from the paint party today. We also started planning when and where we need to be to film the rest of our shot list.

Lesson 13: With the editing of the paint party footage now on hold we sat together today to work out each other schedules and when we were free to films. We split the shots into 3 sections, Maldon Shots (anything rural or sea based) Chelmsford Shots (Graffiti, Time lapses, Paint Party) And Heavy Equipment Shots (The Paint Throw).

Lesson 14: We finalized plans for the rest of our shooting schedule with a major filming day the following Wednesday ( Maldon) as well as various test filming days in Chelmsford. We also planned what we were going to do about the Digipak and the Website constructions.

Lesson 15: Our plans for next Wednesday were confirmed and finalized. We also completed some plans for various photography shoots that we will use in the construction of the website and also the digipak. We started creating the website.

Lesson 16: Today we completed one of the first photo shoots. This contained lots of photos in various locations these photos will all be used in the gallery section of the website and also to be used in the creation of the Social media pages. Some of these photos are likely to be used in the tour poster and possibly in the Digipak.

Lesson 17: Today we went over to our test filming location for the graffiti wall section. Here we took footage of James walking across different sections of the wall in different costumes. When reviewing the footage we will decide what looks good and what costume we are going to get him to wear though out the rest of the music video.

Lesson 18: Today we looked over the footage from yesterday. we have finalized his outfit, a denim jacket with claret coloured t-shirt. We also split into two technical teams one to work on the digipak and the other to work on the website.

Lesson 19: Today we further developed our website and Digipak. towards the end we started pulling together ideas for the Tour poster.

Lesson 20: Maldon Filming day today! A 40 minute journey each way to get to our filming location. The sun is shining and the tide is rising, time to shoot some great shots!

Lesson 21: We pulled all of our footage off of the cameras today from the Maldon shoot. This filming session forms the bulk of our video. We are all pleased with how it looks, We have another filming day in Chelmsford tomorrow in which we aim to get the final shots we need for our music video.

Lesson 22: Today we took the final shots fro the music video. We have collated them all on to the media computers and will start on the final stages on editing tomorrow.

Lesson 23: today was spend editing our first draft for the video. We have screenings on Friday at which we are going to receive feedback on how we can improve them to turn our first draft into our final draft.

Lesson 24: Editing completed today for the first draft of our music video whilst we rendered the final video and uploaded it to you tube we finalized the tour poster and also the digipak.

Lesson 25: Today we watched everyone else's first drafts and gave feedback on them. We then received the feedback for our own videos. This has identified areas that we need to work on and improve. We have set another date for re-filming some of the Chelmsford shoots, we have also purchased all of the extra equipment we need for the 'Paint Throwing scene'

Lesson 26: Today we received feedback on our digipak and website. From this feedback we have lots of changes to make. After the session today we went to film the Paint Throwing Scene. James has volunteered to film the timeplase section we need for the choruses.

Lesson 27: We adjusted the digipak and tour poster in accordance with the feedback that we received from it. the final draft of the digipak is now complete and we have received positive feedback upon it.

Lesson 28: all of the footage is not together. We spent today editing all of the lasts bits of footage that we needed to produce our final draft.

Lesson 29: The editing finished today for the Music video and the YouTube upload began. We Are also making a few final tweeks to the digipak and some more major changes to the website.

Lesson 30: The digipak was completed today. We spent a lot of time on the website today, rearranging pages and changing the colour schemes. We also replaced the background image with one that we created today as well. The layout of each page was also changed so that it flows much better now and there is a concurrent theme across it all.