Magazine advert

This is our magazine advert to accompany our digipak and music video. It shows links back to our digipak as the album cover is included on the advertisement for Pandemonia's new album. The flames are used to tie links with the burning building and the band nae however could also have a reference to the burning or destroying of the relationship between the two in the narrative sections of our music video. We can also see here that our lead singer is dressed in the same clothes as she was in performance elements thus making a another link back to the original product.

Our Ancillary Text-Digipak

This is the front and back of our album cover for our band Pandamonia and on it their song Unforgiven. We went with what we thought the band meant in the images used and an urban area was what seemed to appeal most to our audience. The flames show the destruction and the band members on the front in the cotumes they wore for performance elements in the video give ties back to our original product. This is our first ancillary task

More audience research

With just two shots left to film we showed our video to a fellow media student. He said that the performance elements were certainly the highlight of our video due to the talent shown and the lip syncing correctly in time. If he had to make any criticism he says he would have liked to have seen a suggestions that this is a regular occurance. I pointed out again that she had a bruise at the beginning but since it's not always in the light it might not be obvious. So we have the choice of brightening the shot or putting in a still at the beginning of her with a more clear injury. We will let you know what decision we take on this

More filming

On Friday last week we filmed the performance elements of our music video. After a bit of a run around setting the lights and musical kit we got going. The lighting chosen was Some red on the cyc at the back of the stage although with the curtains drawn onstage it created a red glow fro0m the back, 4 spotlights onstage for each member of the band in white alone with some red filters to fill the spaces between the spotlights. We thought that red was appropriate since we had dressed the lead singer in this colour and all others in black. We gave appropriate hairstyles to each and Liv was made up in darker make-up to promote a look similar to Paramore's lead singer. Along with the fact that it relates to the song in the way of a symbolisation of love and death.
The filming overall went well and we have more than enough footage so today in editing it is just to pick out the pieces we need making sure plenty of close ups of the lead singer are included so that we can promote the image we want to.

Target Audiences

Our target audience is a large one, mostly consisting of teenagers and younger adults though many older adults do still listen to our genre. The genre of our music video's song is Rock. This music appeals mostly to young people between the age bracket of around 15 - early 20's.  Most rock music lovers will wear the style associated with it, that is dark colored  t-shirts, or band t shirts, dark jeans, normally skinny jeans, and converse. This is the typical style that the artists of the rock genre wear, so the audience copy's the bands and starts wearing similar things.

Character Profiles

Now that we have our actors defined here is some more depth into our characters for our narrative story and how we have interpreted the lyrics of the song.
Our main female is a young 19-20 year old who lives with her boyfriend. They have been together for about two years and live in a house. Their relationship started out well but then as the lead singer's partner started to drink more he got more and more abuse. The lyrics about being unforgiving is her no longer accepting his apologies for abusing her. That her time is wasted on him, how she will never go back to being treated that way and how he will never find love again because of the way he treats women. All of these lyrics are in the song and an abusive relationship is a common theme throughout many other rock music videos. The friends are concerned for her however due to the now shortening of footage for the narrative we can no longer show their concern for her. Although the fact that she is a strong singer almost suggests that she would bear this problem alone and would not feel the need to share with anyone. Especially if her boyfriend cuts her off from everyone else. This video will appeal to the teenagers further into the age group of about 16-early 20s.

Album cover ideas

In this lesson today we talked about what the album cover for Pandemonium could look like. After lokijng at many different types of album covers from this genre we deicded to look at a combination of the works of Paramore and Evanescence two bands with strong lead female singers. However after looking at albums by Green Day, A Day to Remember, Good Charlotte (especially the album Good Morning Revival) and Lostprophets we can see that our album cover should have an urban background due to their remarks on society and people in their lives that would relat to a city area. Paramore has the idea of the whole band standing on the cover with the lead singer Haley Williams in the foreground as she is the most 'important'. This is repeated on the album cover Good Morning Revival and an album by Green Day is a style we would like to use on our cover. The font used by the band Evanescence on their albums is one of which we would like to copy the style of for the Pandemonium album. If it is possible we wanted an image to reflect the band's name almost like an image on posters for The Dark Knight where buildings are falling however dark and dingy locations are common to Evanescence and Bullet For My Valentine albums as well. These are the real life examples hat we have got our inspiration from.

Exam Information

Full Name; Nick Anderson
Exam Number;  1399

Exam information

Full name: Katherine Matthews
Candidate number: 1220

Photoshop

We had a lesson on the basics of photoshop and having never used this program I was excited to see what it could do and eager to learn some new skills. We learnt of the layers that you use to edit within photoshop when you post several images into a new window which i feel we will be using in the plans for our album cover especially. Colour correction and effects are advanced on this program and there are lots of options to choose from to get the right look for our album cover. Rotation and distortion were also part of our lesson along with changing the position of an object on the screen. All of these are important skills. We learnt how to select to then copy and paste easier shapes like a circle and more complex ones such as a flower petal since cutting an image from its background and making it look good is essential to a good looking product.
One of the main problems people experience is knowing what layer you are in so it is likely that I will label mine when I come to using this software.

Audience research and plans for this weekend

Now that we are at the stage where we are halfway through the filming and editing process, we decided to get in some of our actors and target audience members to get some feedback. Most people were saying that the footage "looked good and sleek" and had "an interesting narrative". But for some people who knew Ben who plays the abusive partner within the video couldn't picture him seriously in this role, other however who didn't know him said that his acting was convincing and scary therefore we feel sorry for the girl in the piece who is the singer.
So all seems to be going according to plan. Apart from a few narrative shots that need to be re-filmed hopefully this weekend. We will be moving on now to film the performance elements of our music video which I am sure will turn out just as well as the narrative. Only a minute left to fill however with the performance and due to this being an importqant genre characteristic for a rock music video mroe footage from the narrative might have to be deleted. A lesson learned here is that shots need to change angles quickly and last a few seconds for the music videos, long shots from one point borethe audience and take up too much time.

Editing

Went to edit today's footage and Final Cut Express was not working for all of last week so we did some work on digipacks which will be posted very soon. After however on Monday getting our footage on and then our track which lasts around 4 and half minutes and after cutting a ordering the limited footage we had from the story board we had come to realise it was longer than the track itself and so some changes needed to be made. This included all of the town scenes where he would drag her away from her friends in a public place to be rendered unnecessary since the plot revolved around her and should we need this shot it would be put at the gig instead of a restaurant afterwards.
Exciting stuff however as we began to add transitions to our shots already, hoping perhaps to be able to use some colour correction on performance elements.
Despite having to remove some of the shots which were considered too long or not needed to add to the storyline there are a short list shots that need to be re-filmed, mostly where the clock changes time-it moves place in the current shots as I have moved the camera in between shooting each time the clock changes so we cannot use a dissolve effect to show the change over time. We hope that this shouldn't take too much time and we have now prepped our performers our ready for the performance elements of the video.

Filming

All of the narrative to our knowledge has been filmed over the Christmas holidays and now we can get stuck into editing the footage. We had Ben Leonie myself and Liv on board along with Nick. We found problems with the lighting as we went along and a few things were re-filmed due to realised continuity errors whilst filming. Hopefully there will be no others!

Storyboard