Digipak CD Covers

Here are 2 of the digipaks which my group have drafted. They are both fairly similar as they follow many conventions from our genre of big beat. This includes bright bold colours and abstract pictures.

Todays Work

This is a piece of work i made to do with what went well with my digipak design - and what went bad. it also gave me a chance to experiment with colours and what kind of colours we could use for our own digipak.

DigipakCD Covers ...

A Digipak is a CD Cover which is made out of plastic and cardboard, it can include pictures and leaflets and have track lists on the back page. The CD is usually placed in the middle of the digipak.

What makes an effective Digipak?

- Good Designs

- Pictures

- Colours which compliment each other

- Simple

- Layout

- Cover Art

Big Beat Poster 2010 ...

This is a recent poster from a Big Beat Reunion Concert. This gives us an idea of how Big Beat music is portrayed and how it appeals to its fans. We are soon going to be making our own poster for our own Big Beat music video, and posters like this can give us inspiration for our own designs.

Comparing Blogs ...

To get some inspiration and compare my blogs to someone else's, i visited longroadmedia.blogspot.com and looked through several blogs of theirs. There was a category for blogs of the week so i looked through them as they would be the best ones to get ideas from to implement into my blog.

How are theirs better?

- There blog posts are usually alot longer than mine and have a better explanation of things.

- They have done more separate pieces of work and posted things which i do not think would be necessary to add.

- They have done more location research, and included maps and weather forecasts for the days they are filming.

How are mine better?

- Mine have all the essential information, sometimes the other blogs have to much information and little details that are not needed.

Galvanize...

"Galvanize" is a song by British electronic duo The Chemical Brothers and the first single released from their 2005 album Push the Button. It was released a week before the album's release and peaked at number 3 in the UK charts. We have decided to use this song instead of our old one as we have changed our mind about how we feel about it and did not like the lyrics on further reflection.

Location Research...

We have though about filming part of our music video on a beach, we believe that with some editing and visual effects we can make this setting suit our chosen genre of 'Big Beat' well. I think that this will be a good place to film as it is different to what other people will be doing and where they will be filming and we can get some good shots of different times of day - for example, sunrise and sunset

This is a shot of the beach at sunset, all the colours are darker and give a completely different, more sinister mood than in the day time.

This gives an entirely different feel to the scene and this is more happy and bright, depending on the mood of the song we can choose to use a scene like this - or the picture before.

This may be a nice background for a green screen effect, with the subjects standing in front of the sea lip syncing.

Thisis another shot where we could stand on the beach lip syncing to 'Galvanize'.

Fat Boy Slim

We have shifted our genre from 'Drum n Bass' to 'Big Beat'. Some artists in this genre are Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and Faithless.

His most famous songs are Rockafeller Skank, Praise You, Brimful of Asha - Cornershop(Norman Cook remix), Weapon of Choice, Gangster Trippin’, I See You Baby - Groove Armada(Fatboy Slim remix), Wonderful Night, Right Here, Right Now.

The Chemical Brothers...

The Chemical Brothers are the UK-based Grammy Award winning electronic music and rave duo of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons. Along with The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and The Crystal Method, as well as other lesser-known acts they were pioneers of the big beat electronic dance genre, and are known for high-quality live sets.

Their first album 'Exit Planet Dust' was released in 1995, along with a name change of the band - from The Dust Brothers, too the Chemical Brothers. They have 6 albums overall, with a new one coming out next year called 'Further'

This is a list of the current albums from 'The Chemical Brothers'.

- Exit Planet Dust

- Dig Your Own Hole

- Surrender

- Come with Us

- Push the Button

- We Are the Night

- Further

Last Lesson...

Last lesson we started the planning for our music video, we had to start deciding where we were going to set the video and do location research for it. Me, todd and jacob have decided to film in multiple locations including portsmouth and london. We have decided that as jacob is going to portsmouth he will take some film and pictures whilst he is there so that we can get an idea of the location before we have to go there and film. Then one day all 3 of us will go up to london to film some key shots, and some backgrounds for the green screen.
We also started to plan our story board in the lesson, but need more location research before we can start an accuratle one.

Location Research:
Portsmouth:
- Some shots of the sea coming in and out.
- Shots of tall buildings.
- Shots of character going along beach.
- Character standing against the sea lip syncing.

London:
- Shots of character standing against the river thames.
- Shots of famous landmarks such as the london eye.

Green Screen...

Last week we had a lesson learning ot use a green screen - it is important that you set up the screen correctly or it will not work corredtly. The correct lighting must be used on the screen so that the green colours ar all the same. You also need to make sure that when you film you do not capture anything outside of the screen or it will casue problems later in editing.

Audience Analysis...

From our results, we have decided to aim our music video towards White British males around the age of 16-20. Our music video will mainly be narrative with cuts to performance. We will make sure our video is ok for all audiences to view by making sure the lyrics are clean and there are no strong themes portrayed. When advertising our music video, we will emphasise the ability to buy online and download it as few people in our questionnaire go to shops to buy music. Drum & Bass was the favourite genre of the people we questionned, so our song and video will be Drum & Bass.

Initial Ideas...

Our initial thoughts were to have a female artist be our performer to a Drum & Bass song. Our first song that we chose to do was Sub Focus - Splash ft. Coco with Lauren Goldsack as the singer. An initial location we had in mind was Boxhill with the scenery behind and changes in scenery without having to travel too far. We think that some lyrics will fit in with Boxhill's scenery and atmosphere; the chorus would be a good section to keep coming back to here.


One prop idea was to have a giant Chubba Chups lolly, to be used to show abstract or a prop during performance. To gather our ideas we had a group discussion just suggesting ideas and see how the group responded. We chose the Drum & Bass genre purely because we thought that not many other people would choose the same and we wanted to challenge ourselves and take ourselves out of our comfort zones. When Designing our CD cover, we decided to advertise an offer of being able to download something for free if you buy it, to help encourage people to buy a CD as most would rather download it.

Final Cut Express Practice...

This is a screenshot of our practice lesson on Final Cut Express, in this lesson we put up a green screen in the classroom and recorded videos of us lip syncing to a song, in our case it was Justin Bieber and Sean Kingstons 'Einee Meinee'. After we uploaded the video onto the macs, we imported it into final cut to prepare for editing, we entered the settings and filtered out the green from the green screen - then replaced it with a background.

This is our final product after all the changes.

Photoshop Work in Progress...

This is my project while it is open in photoshop on the Mac. I used many different tools and methods to get the final result including, gradient - which helped me make a background. Magnetic lasso which allowed me to crop the subject and the lamppost out of the background.

With the use of different layers i can edit different elements in the project which helps me manage my project effectively.

Photoshop CD Cover Analysis ...

This is my the product of my practice on photoshop, I like that it is fairly simple and involves mainly 2 colours - yellow and blue. I like the fact that it is not too complicated because I think it is easy to look at, or in really life it would be the kind of thing i would want to buy.

I used the photoshop tools 'gradient' to get the background, I like the way it starts off as white and then fades into a darker blue. I cropped the picture of jacob leaning against a lamppost so that i could get rid of the background as i didnt think it fitted the style i was looking for.

Photography Analysis ...

In this picture there are many elements i like and think would be good for making a CD cover - I like the way the shot is framed, it is tilted so that the lamp post and subject or slanted forwards - this gives it a sense of surrealism. I also thought that the colours in the photo are good and effective for the genre. There are lots of strong greens in the photo which stand out against the rest of the photo. The shot is a long shot as you can see the whole of the subject in the shot and the whole of the lamppost is shown.

This photo is also a longshot and only has one subject. He is slightly alligned to the right with a door to the left and he is leaning on a fence. The pose he is striking shows that he is gazing at something, this shows a sense of wonder and abstractism - which i think suits our genre and the kind of instruments that are going to be used in the song we use for our video.

Questionnaire

This is the questionnaire me and my group created to find out what types of music our fellow students and family listen too. We also asked questions about how they listen to and download the music, this will help us when it comes to creating the CD cover and poster.

These are the results of our questionairre analysed, and put into graphs for easy viewing.

Low budget Music Videos

Lighting, torches and small spot lights can be used - these are a cheap and effective as they can produce good results when used correctly.
A fig-rig can be used to make a camera steady which is a way of making shots look more professional for a low price.

CD Analysis

Genre Mood Board - Pop

Lyrics Analysis

Concert Poster Analysis

Carol Vernallis - Theory

MTV Style Editing :
Frequent quick cuts
Disjuncture
Different to film editing

Pop video editing has many functions, these change rapidly. No one element must gain the upper hand and it must keep up in the present moment.
- These change rapidly
- No one element must gain upper hand
- It must keep us in the present moment

Shots and edits:
- Pop video editing
- Hollywood editing
- Continuity rules
- Prevents time and space overtaking
- Preserves time and space

Could This Be Real - Sub Focus - Conventions of Genre

This song is called 'Could this be Real' by Sub Focus and contains contains many similar conventions to our music video and other songs in the genre.

Examples:

1- Lip Syncing
2- Cuts to the beat
3- Performance
4- Close ups
5- Flashing coloured lights
6- Fast cuts
7- Eye contact
8- Dark/Gloomy
9- Abstract
10- Flashing Lights

Pendulum - Witchcraft - Conventions of Genre

This is a music video of the song Witchcraft by Pendulum - it is the same genre as the song we will be doing our music video on.

Some conventions of this music video are:

1- Lip Syncing
2- Cuts to the beat
3- Performance
4- Close ups
5- Band
6- Faced pace
7- Eye contact
8- Dark/Gloomy
9- Abstract
10- Flashing Lights

Classwork

This piece of work is when we were finding songs in lesson using youtube, we were trying to find a good song to make a music video for - this meant it must have good lyrics and we had to like it so would have fun working with it.

Theory: Andrew Goodwin

Andrew Goodwin, the author of 'Dancing in The Destruction Factory' His theory is based around 3 main concepts of music videos; Illustration. Amplification and Disjunctive.

Illustration:

- Always cuts to the beat

- Images illustrate the literal meaning of the video. Often it is just a band/artist singing and dancing to their song.

- In the band area people will be singing, dancing and playing musical instruments such as Guitars, drums and pianos. The performers would be dressed as expected.

Amplification:

- The video has mainly cuts the the beat, but on occasions it has cuts off the beat in places where it wants to emphasize a certain bit in the video.

- Images are used to amplify the lyrics, a specific narrative may be used if needed.

- The band takes on fictional roles in the narrative.

Disjunctive:

- Music cuts off the beat - sometimes this is the sign of a bad music video, but if a band is well established they can get away with taking risks like this.

- Images used in the video can be nothing to do with the song or lyrics.

Example of an Amplification video:

Scouting for Girls: This aint a Love song is a song with sad lyrics about a man who is saying goodbye to someone - it is set in an airport. But as well as people being sad and leaving each other their is also happiness, frustration and Love shown in the video. Clips are played of families and couples being reunited, and even a man having an argument. The lead singer is walking through the airport singing but is almost not aware of the other people, and visa versa.

Example of a Disjunctive video:

The lead singer from the band 'Texas' dressed up as Elvis in one of her music videos and performed the song in a way that elvis would, this is not something you would expect for the singer to do.

Killers - Somebody told me Analysis

'Somebody told me' is a rock song by 'The Killers', It was released on the 15th March 2004 and directed by Bret Simon. The video does not have a narrative and is an abstract performance based music video.

0.00

This is an opening scene with all the band, there are strange effects in the shot which shows the slip is abstract and uses editing.

0.30

Here we see a performer with a large screen behind him - the screen has an image of him on it. This is a very abstract shot and has no place in any story.

1.00

This shot shows 2 of the band members, 1 singing and one playing an instrument - the playing of instruments is typical of the rock genre.

1.30

This shows a drummer, most rock bands have drummers - in the background you also bright lights which may attracts the viewers attention.

2.00

This clips is set outside on sand, the band are all playing instruments and performing infront of a white screen.

Paramore - Misery Business Analysis

Misery Business is a song performed by the rock band Paramore. It is

the first single from

the bands second album 'RIOT' and has reached platinum

classification. It is

owned by the record label 'Fueled by Ramen'.It is 2 minutes and 20 seconds long.

0.00

This is a close up of one of the female band member - Hayley williams. We can she that she is making eye contact with us which may make us feel involved in the song and feel as though she is singing to us.

0.30

This is a medium long shot which has 2 characters involved, this clip shows the narrative in the story of 2 girls fighting over a boy.

1.00

This shot shows the lead singer and a drummer in the background, by playing instruments it also shows this is a rock video.

1.30

This is a close up of the female in the story, it shows narrative and by looking into the camera it makes us feel involved.

2.00

This over the shoulder shot shows a that a conversation is going on, which suggests the narrative in the music video.

Queen - Dont Stop Me Now

Don't Stop Me Now is a song by rock group Queen under the record label EMI, featured on their 1978 album Jazz. It was written by Freddie Mercury and it was recorded in August 1978 in Nice, France. It has a length of 3 minutes and 37 seconds.

0.00

This is a medium close up of the lead singer singing into a microphone, the song is just starting up.

0.30

This is now a medium longshot showing the person singing into a microphone.

1.00

This is a shot of one of the performers doing a guitar solo.

1.30

Close up of the lead singer singing into a microphone.

2.00

This is a longshot of 3 of the queen group, this shows them all performing.

2.30

This is a shot of the guitarist doing a solo.

3.00