http://jolliepopsarah.wix.com/bad-gals-fc-3
Final Digipak
Final Video
Friday, 8 March 2013
Final ideas about digipak
Having considered the things that we learnt through the evaluation process, as a group we felt we weren't entirely satisfied with the digipak. A key change was adjusting the lighting to make it more glamorous and we also used a cross-hatch effect over all the images to tie the products together. The impact on the front cover is to give the star a slightly surreal/other wordly effect and we feel this is appropriate for the fantasy dream-like world that this star image embodies. We got the inspiration for this idea from Cheryl Cole's album "Messy Little Raindrops":
Friday, 1 March 2013
Friday, 14 December 2012
Evaluation Task 4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Our group's starting point was to make a girly video aimed at female teenagers. This led us to look for similar products using YouTube. Sarah remembered the Dior Fragrance Advert that reflected the way we wanted to present our music video. Thus, we were able to instantly bring up and analyse the advert in detail to get inspiration for our performance, costume, lighting, set and sound.
I used PowerPoint to produce a treatment of this music video idea, influenced by the advert. This was really useful as it gave a visual concept of what we wanted, as well as verbal that enabled our audience to have a clearer understanding of what we were proposing and thus be able to offer us useful advice. An example of this were screenshots of the silhouette used in the advert as this presented how we wanted to show our silhouette in our music video the most.
One of the things we learned from the feedback during the presentation was the idea of showing our audience that Emma was on a film set. We progressed this idea by looking into existing products. We discovered a Vanessa Paradis music video called 'be my baby' that exposed a film set and it gave us a more clear idea of how we wanted to show our 'on-camera' set:
During the planning of our music video, a technology we used was the Sony NX5 digital camera. The first thing we used this for was for our screen test, to choose our singer. This piece of technology was very easy and quick to use and allowed us to film as much as we wanted. The quality of the film was also very professional.
We filmed three different girls and asked them to pose and dance in front of the camera using three different props. This was very significant as it allowed our group to see what girl looked best on camera and who suited our music video the most.
I used the 'iMovie' programme on my Macbook Pro to edit all these auditions together along with our song, which facilitated us even more to decide who was best suited as we got to see which performance, dance and look fitted best with the track. The significance of doing this what that we were able to compare the girls using each prop on camera very easily by watching the clip and after watching this, our group made a mutual decision that Emma was the best for our music video. We also used the NX5 camera to film Emma dancing behind a white sheet. This was important for us as this made us realise that our silhouette idea would look really good in our music video and that we wanted to use it.
Another technology used during the screen testing was a mobile phone to take 3 pictures of each girl. We asked them to choose 3 poses that they thought suited the singer of our music video the most. Again, this helped us decide which girl looked best on camera and would be the most confident and co-operative on our shoot day. Furthermore, it was clear that Emma had the most sex-appeal infront of the camera, which is what we wanted for our artist.
A technology we frequently used during the process with our cast were texts and emails. This enabled us to keep in touch with them and remind them of screen tests or any practice sessions. The Friday before our shoot, I also sent an email to the whole of our cast going through times, costume and any specific details that they needed to be reminded of. Chuffy then sent the whole cast a text to notify that this important email had been sent and needed to be read that weekend. This enabled us to keep organised and in control to prevent a disaster happening on the shoot day, such as an actor not having their costume.
Researching adverts on YouTube was a significant in the construction of our research and planning. We wrote down all the locations used in the Dior Advert to help us realise that our group needed to ensure that Emma was doing lots of various actions in more than one set, otherwise it wouldn't be appealing to our audience. We also used this list as a basis for producing our storyboard.
Once we completed our storyboard, we were able to make a animatic of this using the NX5 camera to shoot our drawings and 'Final Cut Pro' to cut it together and to add the track. By doing this, we could see how our music video would look more accurately, how long we would need for each shot and if our track fit with the shots we had chosen. From this, we learnt that the shots of the photographer didn't work and that we needed lots more cutaway shots to keep up with the fast beat of the song.
After writing our storyboard, we began researching on the internet to see if any ideas for our photoshoot set came up as we wanted to use pictures to represent our storyboard and not our own drawings. The website 'photo shoot ideas', (http://pinterest.com/bapjap05/photo-shoot-ideas/) we found really useful and we used some images from this to represent shots in our storyboard. From this research, our group decided that we loved the idea of using one of the photoshoots as something very girly, including things such as flowers and mirrors and then use the other shoot for something very glamourous and possibly a 60's style.
We emailed Emma and asked if she had a dress similar to the pink 'hibiscus' dress that seemed to be most predominant of all the websites we looked at.
As a result, Emma found a similar dress that she had and wore it for the first photo-shoot in our music video:
A key technology that we used during our shoot day was using the 18mm lens on our camera that enabled us to shoot the super-wide shot, shown at the beginning and end of our music video. This shot was significant for our music video as it explained our storyline line: it showed that Emma was on a set. This shot also looked great of camera, and very professional and without the lens, we wouldn't have been able to film all three sets and one time.
After our shoot day, we began editing our music video almost immediately using the program Final Cut Pro. We began editing by looking through all our footage, which we were really pleased with. We then chose our favourite clip for each shot we did and synced it in order. We did this with all of our establishing shots, which included all the wides and also our super-wides of the three sets.
Example of super-wide shot:
This wasn't too much of a challenge to sync most of the clips as we began many of our shots with the beginning of the song. However, some clips we had to sync later on in the track, which was a bit harder. We did this by listening to a certain lyric in the clip and then synced it with the lyric in the track we were using in Final Cut Pro. This was really useful because it enabled us to begin our rough cut of the wide shots in order more quickly and more easily. Once we had done this, it was also easier for us to see where the midshots and closeups needed to be inserted.
We also used editing as a language with which to communicate with and position the audience in quite advanced ways. For example, we slowed down the editing pace, to bring the audience towards a high point of the video where a close-up of the artist was used singing the key words, “ain’t gunna love you”. The outcome of this was that our editing meant the close-up provided the audience with something to commit to memory: this line was the crucial line of the song. In other places, we cut to the beat of the song and therefore our editing could draw the audience to the general contours of the songs phase structure. This ensured that the audience would remember the song itself, and not just the video as this is what was being sold.
While we did this, we also worked on our Digipak and Website. For the Digipak, we began by researching on the Internet other artist's digipak like Lily Allen's as she relates to out artist. From this we decided that we needed a colourful digipak as it represents our artist's fun personality that is appealing to our audience. We ultimately research artist's digipaks using the Internet to get a better knowledge of the layout so we could fully understand what we were making. Our research into Rihanna and her digipak for 'LOUD' was also particularly useful.
We decided to have interesting angled shots of only sections of Emma in each cover of the digipak as it teased and pleased our target audience. We used a cropping and dimension tool on the programme 'Photoshop' to crop each picture into the right template, which worked out really well as we really liked the effect that this gave the digipak as it made every page as it fit our target audience interest in fashion and beauty. The body shapes also provide a bit of titillation for potential boys, which is how we wanted to portray our artist.
We also used Photoshop to crop round Emma's face on the front cover, using the' magnetic lasso' tool to delete the the background and then copy a section of colour from the other backgrounds to paste Emma's face ontop of to create the right colour background.
This was really useful as our audience feedback had mentioned previously that it would be more appealing if all the backgrounds were the same colour.
We also used Photoshop and the website 'dafont.com' for our font, which enabled us to use a font that was girly, fun and therefore, appealing to our female audience.
Other programmes we used were 'Light room' for: exposure, sharpening, blending and contrasting to make our images as appealing as possible, which made our digipak even more striking.
During this process, we were working on our website. We used the website 'wix', designed for creating websites. It allowed us to use a variety of tools enabling us to make our website original and the most suited to our audience. These tools included: many font tools, image tools and effects, background tools, text box effects, and all sorts of aspects that provided us with a range of looks for our website. The first tool we used was choosing the template for our website. 'Wix' provided us with a number of templates to choose from and allowed us to move, change and insert things to the template we chose to make it more original and specific to our preferences. This was significant as we had to make our website as suited and appealing to our target audience as possible. When we received audience feedback, it was clear that they wanted our music video, website and digipak to compliment each other so our website needed to be colourful and vibrant. Consequently, the contrasts between our first layout (before more research and audience feedback) and our final website is significant:
To make the merchandise products for our website, we used a website called 'makeyourownclothes.com'. We first tried to do make our merchandise on paint but it didn't provide us as useful tools than this website did. This website enabled us to choose: the colour, size, writing, position of writing and much more tools that meant our brand looked more professional.
I used PowerPoint to produce a treatment of this music video idea, influenced by the advert. This was really useful as it gave a visual concept of what we wanted, as well as verbal that enabled our audience to have a clearer understanding of what we were proposing and thus be able to offer us useful advice. An example of this were screenshots of the silhouette used in the advert as this presented how we wanted to show our silhouette in our music video the most.
During a screen test, we tried out our silhouette idea with Emma and decided that it was an idea that we definitely wanted to use in our music video:
We developed this idea further and used a white board in our music video so the image of Emma's body was clear:
During the planning of our music video, a technology we used was the Sony NX5 digital camera. The first thing we used this for was for our screen test, to choose our singer. This piece of technology was very easy and quick to use and allowed us to film as much as we wanted. The quality of the film was also very professional.
We filmed three different girls and asked them to pose and dance in front of the camera using three different props. This was very significant as it allowed our group to see what girl looked best on camera and who suited our music video the most.
I used the 'iMovie' programme on my Macbook Pro to edit all these auditions together along with our song, which facilitated us even more to decide who was best suited as we got to see which performance, dance and look fitted best with the track. The significance of doing this what that we were able to compare the girls using each prop on camera very easily by watching the clip and after watching this, our group made a mutual decision that Emma was the best for our music video. We also used the NX5 camera to film Emma dancing behind a white sheet. This was important for us as this made us realise that our silhouette idea would look really good in our music video and that we wanted to use it.
Another technology used during the screen testing was a mobile phone to take 3 pictures of each girl. We asked them to choose 3 poses that they thought suited the singer of our music video the most. Again, this helped us decide which girl looked best on camera and would be the most confident and co-operative on our shoot day. Furthermore, it was clear that Emma had the most sex-appeal infront of the camera, which is what we wanted for our artist.
Technology was key for our screen test but it also came with problems. We thought that we could use the wifi to play the song on YouTube on one of our laptops / phones but it let us down and caused us to start the screen test later than we wanted. Although, in the end, technologies were an amazing powerful tool to help solve our problems as we recorded on Sarah's mobile phone, the song from Youtube from a computer and then were able to play this in the Studio connected to a speaker.
Technology was also key for our rehearsal with our complete cast before the shoot day. The camera proved really useful for testing our choreography: we realised that our original choreography for the boys made them look awkward on camera and therefore we could play around trying different things in the rehearsal to see what worked and what didn't. We then edited this all together using 'Final Cut Pro' and decided our final choreography through this.
Researching adverts on YouTube was a significant in the construction of our research and planning. We wrote down all the locations used in the Dior Advert to help us realise that our group needed to ensure that Emma was doing lots of various actions in more than one set, otherwise it wouldn't be appealing to our audience. We also used this list as a basis for producing our storyboard.
Once we completed our storyboard, we were able to make a animatic of this using the NX5 camera to shoot our drawings and 'Final Cut Pro' to cut it together and to add the track. By doing this, we could see how our music video would look more accurately, how long we would need for each shot and if our track fit with the shots we had chosen. From this, we learnt that the shots of the photographer didn't work and that we needed lots more cutaway shots to keep up with the fast beat of the song.
After writing our storyboard, we began researching on the internet to see if any ideas for our photoshoot set came up as we wanted to use pictures to represent our storyboard and not our own drawings. The website 'photo shoot ideas', (http://pinterest.com/bapjap05/photo-shoot-ideas/) we found really useful and we used some images from this to represent shots in our storyboard. From this research, our group decided that we loved the idea of using one of the photoshoots as something very girly, including things such as flowers and mirrors and then use the other shoot for something very glamourous and possibly a 60's style.
Around this time, our group began to realise that being creative wasn't about doing something individual and that this research was really useful to give us inspiration. Our teacher introduced a definition of creativity to our group, which helped us realise this idea, "The making of the new and the rearranging of the old" (Bentley 1997). These images were particularly inspirational for our sets, especially the image of the flowers and fairy lights on the wall. (shown above)
The internet was significant for our research and planning because it allowed us to look at a wide range of choices for our costumes and sets. It also was very quick and easy so we didn't spend too much time, particularly on costume to decide what we wanted. To find the dress for Emma's first girly photoshoot, we looked at websites like 'www.polyvore.com' after typing on google image 'twiggy style dresses'.
As a result, Emma found a similar dress that she had and wore it for the first photo-shoot in our music video:
A key technology that we used during our shoot day was using the 18mm lens on our camera that enabled us to shoot the super-wide shot, shown at the beginning and end of our music video. This shot was significant for our music video as it explained our storyline line: it showed that Emma was on a set. This shot also looked great of camera, and very professional and without the lens, we wouldn't have been able to film all three sets and one time.
After our shoot day, we began editing our music video almost immediately using the program Final Cut Pro. We began editing by looking through all our footage, which we were really pleased with. We then chose our favourite clip for each shot we did and synced it in order. We did this with all of our establishing shots, which included all the wides and also our super-wides of the three sets.
Example of super-wide shot:
This wasn't too much of a challenge to sync most of the clips as we began many of our shots with the beginning of the song. However, some clips we had to sync later on in the track, which was a bit harder. We did this by listening to a certain lyric in the clip and then synced it with the lyric in the track we were using in Final Cut Pro. This was really useful because it enabled us to begin our rough cut of the wide shots in order more quickly and more easily. Once we had done this, it was also easier for us to see where the midshots and closeups needed to be inserted.
We also used editing as a language with which to communicate with and position the audience in quite advanced ways. For example, we slowed down the editing pace, to bring the audience towards a high point of the video where a close-up of the artist was used singing the key words, “ain’t gunna love you”. The outcome of this was that our editing meant the close-up provided the audience with something to commit to memory: this line was the crucial line of the song. In other places, we cut to the beat of the song and therefore our editing could draw the audience to the general contours of the songs phase structure. This ensured that the audience would remember the song itself, and not just the video as this is what was being sold.
While we did this, we also worked on our Digipak and Website. For the Digipak, we began by researching on the Internet other artist's digipak like Lily Allen's as she relates to out artist. From this we decided that we needed a colourful digipak as it represents our artist's fun personality that is appealing to our audience. We ultimately research artist's digipaks using the Internet to get a better knowledge of the layout so we could fully understand what we were making. Our research into Rihanna and her digipak for 'LOUD' was also particularly useful.
This was really useful as our audience feedback had mentioned previously that it would be more appealing if all the backgrounds were the same colour.
To make the merchandise products for our website, we used a website called 'makeyourownclothes.com'. We first tried to do make our merchandise on paint but it didn't provide us as useful tools than this website did. This website enabled us to choose: the colour, size, writing, position of writing and much more tools that meant our brand looked more professional.
Thursday, 13 December 2012
Final Products
Last Friday was the deadline for our products and therefore,
our group completed the music video, website and digipak for then.
I am really pleased with the digipak as it compliments the music video considerably presenting Emma in a fun, flirtatious, yet cheeky and sexy way. Mina decided to have interesting angled shots of only sections of Emma in each cover of the digipak. A4 panel digipak also worked out to be more effective.
Overall, I am really happy with our final products and think they represent our artist really well. After researching into similar products, we realised that we wanted our artist to be similar to singers like Lily Allen as they are fun, target a young girl audience but are also attractive and sexy. I feel that we have reached this goal with our finalised products and that the audience feedback we received helped us to fulfil this. I feel that our group worked really well together and never had any serious problems with the tasks we decided to give one another and the goals we set for each product.
Here is the
digipak:
I am really pleased with the digipak as it compliments the music video considerably presenting Emma in a fun, flirtatious, yet cheeky and sexy way. Mina decided to have interesting angled shots of only sections of Emma in each cover of the digipak. A4 panel digipak also worked out to be more effective.
Response to audience feedback
Mina took the feedback into consideration and consequently,
she made the font clearer. She also
tried to move the font (names of songs) on the back cover to be a bit more visible but we decided against this, as it became disaligned with the barcode and wasnt' as presentable. We thought about changing the colour of the font but this didn't work either.
The website:
I am also really pleased with the website, which also compliments the other products since we received audience feedback.
I am also really pleased with the website, which also compliments the other products since we received audience feedback.
Response to audience feedback
Sarah and Chuffy took into consideration the fact that the
website didn’t represent our artist as well as it should. They changed the background for the website
and used an image of Emma that reflected her in the exact way that both the
music video and digipak do.
During our production meeting, we realised that the website had 'Emma Hodgson' on the homepage while the digipak had 'Emma' and therefore we decided to take off 'Hodgson' on the website's homepage to make the products more similar:
The original merchandise I didn't feel were very suitable and in the production meeting it was clear our group agreed. Chuffy, therefore, improved the merchandise page considerably and now it suits the feel of our artist much more as it relates to our fans that are interested in fashion at beauty:
During our production meeting, we realised that the website had 'Emma Hodgson' on the homepage while the digipak had 'Emma' and therefore we decided to take off 'Hodgson' on the website's homepage to make the products more similar:
The original merchandise I didn't feel were very suitable and in the production meeting it was clear our group agreed. Chuffy, therefore, improved the merchandise page considerably and now it suits the feel of our artist much more as it relates to our fans that are interested in fashion at beauty:
Overall, I am really happy with our final products and think they represent our artist really well. After researching into similar products, we realised that we wanted our artist to be similar to singers like Lily Allen as they are fun, target a young girl audience but are also attractive and sexy. I feel that we have reached this goal with our finalised products and that the audience feedback we received helped us to fulfil this. I feel that our group worked really well together and never had any serious problems with the tasks we decided to give one another and the goals we set for each product.
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