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

Previous blog

Here is a link to our last blog where we began our music video research
http://imaginarybeardproductions.blogspot.com/

Actors and characters

Ok so now that people have definitely confirmed with us that they would like to be in our film and are available in the Christmas holidays we can now give the official list of actors names.
Main character/ singer- Olivia Sherman
Acting alongside her as her partner - Benjamin Wise
Her friends who take her on a night out- Katy Matthews and Leonie Evans
Bass Player- Nathaniel Spence
Drums- Alex Peacock
These are all the people starring in along with a whole load of extras for the gig scenes. I would like to outline why we have chosen these people for our film.
Liv Sherman was chosen because she can sing confidently as well as play guitar. This made her a good candidate for being able to sing confidently in front of a camera even though the audio would be edited out. Not only this but due to acting alongside her in GCSE drama I am confident that she will act the role well and understands acting concepts.
Ben Wise was chosen due to his musical talent. Although he isn't required to play an instrument or sing he knows a lot about instruments and vocals and so he and Liv together seem like nothing could go wrong musically. Not only does he look in his early 20s which is the age we need him to be but we feel that he could portray a menacing nature we need the boyfriend to communicate. As a good actor and someone known for their commitment and organization he is a reliable and talented person to be in our film.
Leonie Evans and myself are good friends with Liv and we felt that because of the real life connection we share it would be easier to portray on camera naturally. Not only this but Leonie and I are confident with acting and since it is only a small role I am glad to participate in the project as well as directing and filming alongside Nick.
The bassist and drums are well-known people within our year for playing these instruments well. After watching them play either at gigs or just as an audition for us we can tell that Nat and Alex are the right people to chose to play in the video.
And finding the extra screaming fans at the gig shouldn't be hard with all the talent we have in our video

Shot List

• Black Screen-Fades up to
• Extreme Close Up-Sirens flashing
• Fade to Black...Fade up
• Mid-shot, tilted down, Point of View-Chalk outline of bdy on the floor
• Fade to Black...Fade up
• Close-up-Picture frame showing a couple happy arms round each other (maybe on holiday?)
• Fade to black...fade up
• Establishing shot, long shot, tilted up-A house where the couple live
• Establishing shot , long shot-Through window into a bedroom we can see a girl sat at a dressing table applying make-up
• Mid-shot-Reflection in the mirror we watch her apply make-up and begin singing
• Mid-shot-no longer filming the reflection but filming herdirectly continues singing. She turns as if to hear a door
• Long shot-her halfway through turning. She gets up and walks over to the door
• Extreme CU-We see the door handles pressed down and the door open-Jump to
• Long shot-She walks down the 2nd half of the stairs
• Mid-shot, POV-Front door opening...but from outside to inside so we see our main character open it
• Establishing shot, mid-shot-two girls stood on the front door who appear to knw the girl. They are dressed up and look like thy are about to go out.
• Extreme CU-Keys unlock the car
• Mid-shot-Car drives away. But we can see through the window that the girls are in the car
• Establishing shot, long shot, tilted down-'The Band' playing on a stage, 3 members, female singer/guitarist, bass player and drummer. Lead singer is also our main character, same actor
• Close-up lead singer-singing with emotion
• Long shot,two shot -shows bass player and drums showing their talent as artists
• Mid-shot of lead (quick shot)
• Close-up of guitar being played
• Establishing/mid-shot-Boyfriend unlocks the front door (we know the house from the girlfriend and we know they are together because of the picture frame)
• Mid-shot-opens fridge door
• Close-up of taking beer
• Mid-shot-Him on sofa turns on TV and gulps a swig of beer
• Close-up of eyes looking towards the clock
• Extreme CU-Clock-FF>>| 2 hours
• Mid-shot-Angry boyfriend gets out phone
• Establishing shot-girlies at the gig together
• Mid-shot of girlfriend at table-she takes out her phone
• Extreme CU-She denies the call
• CU -Girlfriends face from worried and series to smiling and laughing with her friends again forgetting about the call
• Cut back to mis-shot of boyfriend-he looks dissapointed-he changes TV channel and puts his phone beside him
• Long-shot th girls get up to leave the gig and alkby the camera laughing
• Long shot of the band  playing at gig
• Close-up of lead singer
• Establishing shot of girls now at a bar
• Mid-shot they sit at a table
• Over the shoulder of the boyfriend
• CU of the clock
• Long shot, gets up and puts on his jacket-looks in a diary
• CU- writing in diary "Pandemonium concert with girls <3"
• Long shot as he walks and then slams the front door
• Long shot of band again at gig
• Guitar solo!-Close-up of guitarists skill
• Close-up looking down the guitar
• Mid-shot of guitarist
• Wide shot-Girls laughing round table in bar
• Mid-shot-Boyfriend enters the bar
• Long shot-We see the girlfriend recognise him andher face falls
• Long shot-He walks over
• Two-shot-She picks up her bag and appears to try to stand to leave
• Two-shot-Him and her, mis-shot of him, close-up of her-he pulls her up off screen by her hair
• Mid-shot of him pulling her away-friends in background horrified
• Long shot he pushes her and she falls into a chair
• Close-up of her scared
• Close-up of his face angry
• Mid-shot she gets up
• POV-We see them leave point of view of girlfriends
• Mid-shot-Of girls getting their bags to go after them
• Long shot-girls run out the door
• Extreme long shot-We see tail lights dissapearing
• Mid-shot-Girls look at each other worried
• Two shot in the car he shouts at her
• Over the shoulder-he still shouts at her lookin back to the road every now and again
• Over the shoulder-she is crying.
• Over the shoulder he stops the car and he gets out
• Long shot-back of the car he throws open her door and hauls her out by her ar.
• Mid-shot-He takes her down the path
• Mid-shot opens door
• Mid-shot opens kitchen door
• Establishing shot of kitchen he pushes her in keeping a hold of her
• Mid-shot we see shadows which appear to show him hitting her
• Mid-shot, tilted down, POV-We see her slumped against a counter
• Tilted up-He is breathing heavily over her he turns away
• Mid-shot we see her get up
• Close-up-Her face realisation
• Over the shoulder we see her reach for a knife
• Long shot we see her come up behind him and say somthing, he turns
• Two shot-We see her stab him
• Close-up his facial expression
• Close-up-her facial expression
• Mid-shot he slumps
• Longs shot of him on floor her just standing there staring
• Long shot-just her she leans back and slumps
• Close-up of sirens-repeat

Initial Brainstorming

To help us create some ideas the whole cl\ass listened to each others tracks and wrote down what we imagined or would be effective in our music video. Many people in our class and beyond suggested a couple within the video. I think this is due to the lyrics,sung by a woman they reflect how she will not forgive the man she is with for what he has done. Many people had images of the couple arguing. Overall it was clear our video needed a narrative within it. We toyed with some ideas as to what the situation could entail. Cheating? Abuse? Maybe he is a soldier going off to war? Due to the sound of the drumming at the beginning many people had suggested the heme of war within our video. We eventually settled on the idea of domestic abuse yet we have chosen to portray it subtly as opposed to brutally so our video would be able to be shown on TV which seems to be a main platform where much of our audience would access music videos. Many people sad they imagined the band in an open location like over looking a city and some suggested they play at a concert. But all seemed to think that a performance element was important within the rock genre which certainly fits in with Goodwin's theory. Some creative ideas were discarded due to their almost impossible nature or it was not a path the majority seemed keen on pursuing.

Audience Research

Our audience research gave us lots to think about in regad to our music video.
We gave our survey to an equal amount of males and females so the results are unbiased in regard to gener
On average how many music videos do you watch a week?
0 videos- 3/10
1-2 videos- 5/10
30+- 2/10

Which out of these would you want to see in a rock music video?
The answers we included were:

• Grungy abandoned location-5 people
• Lyrics and visuals to link-5 people
• Lots of shots of the talented artists-4 people
• Crowds of people-2 people
• Artists alone-1 person
• A narrative-6 people
• A love story-None
• If other please specify: Only one said other and suggested fire in our video

Out of the locations listed please tick your two ideals for a music video to be set?

• Urban city 7/20
• Country side 1/20
• Woods 3/20
• Graveyard 1/20
• House 1/20
• Warehouse 5/20

(20 possible responses not 20 asked however two only picked one answer)

Do you expect the rock artists to wear cetain brands that are associated with the genre?
Yes 2/10
No
I don't think it's important 8/10

In a music video you expect to see talent. Do you expect your artists to be conventionally 'good looking' too?
Yes 2/10
No 1/10
It's not as important as talent 4/10
I don't think it's important 3/10

Where do you hear about new music videos the most?
Youtube 4/10
A TV channel 2/10
Band sites
Spotify/iTunes
Through a friend 4/10
Other

Which do you know first:
I see the video and if I like it I download the track 1/10
I hear the track and then I check out the video 9/10

What would you like to see on a band website?
Tour/gig dates 10/10
Interviews with the band 4/10
Money off of new tracks they are releasing 6/10
Band merchandise 6/10
Adverts for music 4/10
Other: Screensavers/posters to buy of the artists

Out of these album covers which appeals to you the most and why?




The first album cover had three votes, the middle none and the last was the most popular with seven votes.
Some of the reasons given for picking the last option were:

• The art on it relates to the title
• I dislike the other two as one is too complex and one is too simple.
• It's more artistic
• The image appeals to me the most
• It is interesting, different and eyecatching

The reasons people picked the first option are

• It looks darker and so applies to the genre
• It is the most interesting as it has the most detail
• Obviously done by a talented artist

Since our location was planned to be a house in an urban area this certainly agrees with the data. We are better off if we were to advertise the track to do it on TV or online as there seems to be more activity there. Perhaps if we get a USP it would become viral as through a friend was a comon way of hearing about music. There is going to be a narrative in our video along with performance elements because we feel talent is important in this genre. The questions on websites and album covers I feel have given us a further idea into how our advertising could be composed.

Labour split

The labour between me and Nick for this project is split as follows.
Joint responsibilities:

• Camera operator
• Director
• Editor
• Special effects

Nick's responsibilities:

• Storyboard artist
• Set designer
• Sound design
• Lighting

Katy's responsibilities:

• Continuity
• Actor
• Props
• Costume design
• Make-up