Magazine Advert Research and Planning

Whilst working on the digipak, we began to plan the magazine advertisement that was the remaining ancillary task. It is important to link all three of our products so by planning the digipak and advert together we could achieve this. First we looked at some current adverts found in some music magazines. We chose to look at the magazines that featured in Q magazine and how these were laid out following the post about our target audience, which you can see here.

 After looking at these adverts, I began to plan what our magazine advert could look like after taking inspiration from these adverts and narrowing down the images I could use. Based on some of the pictures from our recording and the digipak ideas, I came up with these ideas:

The majority of magazine advertisements are simple and are designed to draw attention to key things such as who the album artist is, when it will be released and the reviews of the album. They commonly feature a large image of either the band or singer to establish their identity. The advert for the album by Elton John and Leon Russell is an example of the simple layout and colour scheme used in adverts and I have circled parts of the image that will need to be included on our advert.

For my first idea, I thought about using a similar colour scheme to this advert and a similar layout, with an image of the band in the centre and the information above and below this. The key things in the image are written in the largest font.

For the second idea I took more ideas from the Bob Dylan advert as this featured an image of a single person like I was using. I thought this idea could work if I similarly featured a picture of the album on the advert, as this would establish the band as a whole despite the lead singer being the only one to feature on the advert. I used a similar structure to this advert when designing my own and also highlighted some other features of the advert I could include.

The aspects that also need to be included are the website name so that people interested can go to the band's website and the HMV logo which can show where to buy the album from. 

For both our digipak and advert, we needed the logo's of the companies associated with One Republic to feature on the products. After some research, we found that One Republic's record labels were Mosley Music Group and Interscope Records, both of which are owned by Universal Music Group. We found the logo's of these and featured them on our advert and digipak.

Further Digipak Research and Ideas

These are some small designs that we could possibly use for our digipak. We took the idea of using different colours for 'One Republic' and 'Letting Go' from existing One Republic digipaks and also thought the tiled effect used in the top right hand corner could be used as a pattern on the back cover and inside cover, as it resembles a stained glass window.

Digipak Ideas

After brainstorming ideas, Elliot began to make some drafts of the front cover of our digipak. I also drew up a plan of the entire digipak and kept it consistent with Elliot's ideas, using similar images such as the doves and clouds.

The original idea we had was the black background with doves. Elliot made this by creating a cloudy effect and then downloading a brush for doves. After selecting some doves he added a blur and a glow to them to give them a different effect. He then created some subtle rays of light coming through the clouds as this kept the theme of secrets and confession.

He experimented with the dove idea in some other designs, for example the candle cover and the cello idea.

We all liked these ideas, however we did notice that the candle did not feature in our video and this would not create consistency across our platforms, and also the cello covers look like they are intended for classical genres.

The last point was to choose our font for the digipak. This font would also feature in our magazine advert as this would keep the coherancy. We chose the font Headline from DaFont.com, and felt this font worked well with our designs. It suggested a mix of formality and informality with its blocky text. It also fitted well with previous fonts used by One Republic.

One Republic - Digipak Logo's and Styles

Elliot began looking at the existing One Republic digipaks and whether they had any similarities. Each of the albums have a different font used on the front covers, as you can see from the image on the left. The albums also do not display a band logo allowing us a freedom when designing our own digipak. Despite this, there are many similarities between the fonts, as they all use black, white and browns as a distinct colour scheme. The fonts are all formal which reflects the band as a whole, as throughout their music videos they are seen wearing formal clothing. This style further promotes the band's image. In some cases, the same fonts are used for both the name of the band and the album title, but the difference is indicated by a change of colour.

The album artwork is generally abstract as you can see in the image on the right. 'Waking Up' uses paint splatters as an album artwork, and 'Dreaming Out Loud' uses a silhouette of a tree on a blue starry background. This album cover is the only one that appears to have some relevance to the title of the album, as dreaming is commonly associated with stars and night.

'Apologize' is one album cover that shows the band as a whole, where you can see they are dressed formally and the structure of the image gives an indication of the members of the band. The lead singer is presented at the front, and the remaining band members are situated behind him, showing his importance and role in the band. If we use an image of our band as a whole we would need to pay attention to how we set up the image like this.

Digipak Research

To start putting ideas together for our ancillary tasks, we first needed to look at some existing products. We need to create a digipak for our song, so I looked at some albums of the same genre to our song that I had in my house. The analysis of these will give us a good idea of what to create for our own digipak.

The first album I looked at was American Idiot by Green Day.

The front cover of the album is a piece of artwork rather than an image of the band, and depicts a hand holding a heart shaped grenade. A theme of destruction is presented with the use of simplistic red, white and black colours and a blocky, distorted font. 'Green Day' is the largest text on the front cover followed by 'American Idiot', the album name, in a smaller size but in a red font. The front cover also features a sticker showing the most popular songs that feature on the album, and quotes from magazines and newspapers such as NME, who say the album is 'marvellous, 8/10'. The sticker is a good idea as it draws attention to the most popular songs of the album. If we chose to make a full album rather than a single, this idea would be good as we could make the song we chose to create a video for stand out from the rest of the album.

The inside of the album shows the back of the front cover and the CD case. The inside cover of the album sticks to the same colour scheme as the front cover, and although it does not have any pictures of the band itself, their identity is shown as their names are highlighted in large, red writing and their roles in the band are written beneath in small white writing. Other names listed on the inside cover include the producer, place of recording, additional musicians and guest singers. Behind where the CD would be placed is a simple black background, and this panel of the pack does not feature anything interesting to do with the band.

The back cover of the album, like most, shows the list of songs featuring on the album, and a picture of the pin from the grenade featuring on the front of the album is shown on the back. This creates a sense of coherancy throughout the album. Other aspects featured on the back cover include barcodes, 'Parental Advisory' label, and advertisement for 'greenday.com' and 'repriserecords.com'.

The second album I looked at was the Employment by the Kaiser Chiefs. This album was very similar to American Idiot as a brown, tiled theme is displayed throughout the album and many features of the album design are in the same place.

The Kaiser Chiefs use a similar colour scheme of browns and yellows throughout the album and similar to the Green Day album, the back cover of this album features the song list, barcodes and contributors to the album. 'Kaiserchiefs.co.uk' is also featured on the back of the album in an attempt to link people interested in the Kaiser Chiefs to their website. On the front cover, the usual 'Kaiser Chiefs' font is used and their album name is written in a different, italic font. The front cover also shows a sticker stating 'special edition' and this feature of an album appears to be very common, so we will have to take this into consideration.

Unlike the Green Day album, the inside of the album behind where the CD would be place features a pattern that is coherant throughout the album. The inside cover also shows the names of the songs in the album and a small change in design is shown. The back and inside covers are different to the front cover and CD panel, as they depict lighter colours.

The next album that I looked at was'U218 Singles'.

This album was different to the other two as it focused much more on the band identity with pictures of the band themselves. A black and white colour scheme is used throughout the design and three different pictures of the band feature across three panels of the album. The panel behind the CD is plain black, similar to the Green Day album. Many albums appear to not have any kind of pattern behind the CD, and if they do it is very simplistic.

How to Keyframe

One of our ideas for our final cut was having a small sign pop up at the start and end of the video indicating what the song is called and who it is by. The way to do this is by keyframing. This allows you to lay an image over another and move with to parts of the screen you want to. We may also add a watermark to the video for example the MTV Rocks logo, as that is the channel we feel our video would be best suited to.

The way we learned how to do this was watching more videos by Final Cut King who had made two videos; the first a simple guide to keyframing and the other a guide to layering.

Rough Cut Feedback

Once our rough cut was finished, the rest of the class watched the video and wrote feedback on areas that were good and areas that needed improvement. Many people agreed that the shots and angles used for the instruments were good and drums were synced to the music the best. The video flows quite well as a whole however there are a few improvements that need to be made and the class did pick up on these.

• To begin, many people said that the lighting was varied throughout the video and this needs to be corrected. The problems we had were that our own lighting was not powerful enough for some shots of the singer and also the light coming through the window was sometimes too bright, obscuring the rest of the shot. Hopefully when we next film the natural lighting will be slightly less, if not we will have to edit the contrast of our shots.

• Our classmates said that we need more shots of the singer looking into the camera as this will create a better connection with the audience. This will be easy to correct and we can refilm the majority of the singer shots.

• It was also suggested that we refilm the opening as it is a bit jolty and we decided this was a good idea because there was a bigger and more interesting stained glass window in the church. 

• Something that many people thought was a problem was the shots of the cello strings. The bow seems to be moving too slow over the strings however the cellist is playing the right tune. Our teacher suggested more shots of the fingers of the cellist and violinist to accompany the close up shots of the strings because this will show the audience the right tune is being played. 

• In some areas we also need to edit the syncing in time with the music.

After the feedback, we are pleased with the result of our rough cut but now know some more aspects we can improve on the easily make our video better. We are refilming in the church again on the 5th of February were we will:

1. Re film the opening using the bigger stained glass window and less jolting

2. Re film singer shots we liked from the rough cut with better lighting

3. Film more shots of singer looking at camera

4. Film a close up of lips with the line ‘all my secrets away’

5. Film more varied shots of strings and fingers

6. Create more energy in chorus

7. Film faster cello shots so they look correct to the audience

Equipment

Here is the list of equipment we will require when shooting our video:

• Sony Handycam Video recorder
• Camera Tape
• Hand held lamps and lighting
• Digital Camera
• Toshiba laptop
• Speakers
• Music player
• Extension cable.

The actors in the video will be bringing:

• Cello
• Guitar
• Violin
• Drums
• Microphone
• Amps

Shooting Schedule

Risk Assessment

Change of Plan

Originally, we were planning on shooting our music video at St. Michaels and All Angels Church on the 30th of December. However, a few days prior to our shoot the vicar told us that the church would be under construction from the beginning of the new year and we would be unable to film in there again. This meant that we would have to change church because we knew it would take more than one day of filming to complete our video. We decided to go to the church anyway in order to practise using the camera, but when we arrived no one was there to let us inside.
We then had to look for a new church. Alfie contacted another local church in Dartford called the Holy Trinity Church, and they agreed to let us use the church on the 15th January.

Actor Profiles

Actors Clothing

I drew this picture of the types of clothing we want our band members to wear as this will reflect the formal style of the video.

Things Learned from Storyboarding

From using FinalCut to create our animatic, we learned how to import music and shots into the program, how to input text and image overlays, and adding effects and transitions to our music video.

For the beginning of our music video, to reflect the slow pace of the music, we incorporated fading transitions. The list of transitions and effects can be seen on the right. For cuts between a chorus and verse we used an additive dissolve, which appeared a lot quicker and sharper, depicting the quicker pace of music.

For some of our shots, we are going to have camera movement and pans but we could not convey this in our drawings. We used a text overlay to show pans and movement that would occur when we film the music video.

The above screenshot shows the other effects and tools we could possibly use when editing the final video. Blurs and Lens Flares may be used as well as changing the colours of the video. We could use saturation or contrast tools when making our video.

Animatic Storyboard

Whilst creating the animatic we made various changes to the storyboard, for example video transitions at the beginning, reflecting the slow pace of the music. We then mirrored this idea for the end of the song to create consistency and also show that th emusic is slowing down again.

We had to find a powerful and unique shot for our final shot, so we began thinking of things we could use in the church. Candles and darkness gave a good contrast for our final scene so we thought that we could have the singer blowing out a candle at the end of the song. We then had to decide which shot to use, and we had two good choices. The first of these was a long shot whereby you could only see the singer blowing out the candle and the light coming through the stained glass window. Another idea was to end with a close up of the singer blowing out the candle and the whole screen fading to black.

We chose the final idea as our final shot because we thought it was more emotive and relevant to the lyrics. We knew that we then needed to incorporate candles into the music video throughout so that the video made sense, so we decided to have various candles dotted around the setting of the video.

St. Michael's and All Angels Church Slideshow

Storyboarding

After finalising the setting and picking the various actors for the video, we had to begin storyboarding. We had little idea how long this process would actually take until we got down to doing it. Here you can see various pictures of us working on the storyboard.

1. Initially, we sat down as a group and simply listened to the song, and imagined which cuts, shots and angles we could use. The hard part was then recording our ideas, and agreeing on them as a group. We had to continuously listen to the song, sometimes only a second at a time, and then write down what cuts and shots we should use. There were many disagreements during the process but eventually we found something that pleased everyone.

2. We then had to draw out the ideas we had already written using the storyboard sheets. Alfie and I listened to the song, whilst I drew the angles and shots he was describing. Aflie also made note of the timings for each shot and their duration. Elliot then listened to the song along with the images we had drawn and pointed out flaws or weaknesses.

3. The image on the right shows some of the progress we have made with storyboard. You can see the images we have put together and the piece of paper we used initially to record ideas.After we made it to around halfway through storyboarding the song, we took photographs of the images we had drawn incase we lost any sheets, and then began to upload them onto the computers. We then began to edit them into final cut along with the music, to see how it was looking so far.

Church Options

St. Michaels and All Angels Church

After our e-mail back from the church St Michaels and All Angels, we visited the website to see if they had any images of inside the church.
We found this:
Our first impressions were that the setting was ideal, and we all particularly liked the large window as we had planned for this sort of church. However Alfie said that he was unsure of the space below the window that we could use to film, so we e-mailed the church back asking if we could visit and look around for ourselves.

The image of the stained glass window that we found proved to be very promising, as it was the type of window that we were looking for.










Stone St. Mary's Church, Greenhithe

This is the church that Alfie's friend Ollie can gain access to, but there were now pictures of the interior on the website. We then arranged with ollie as to when we could go and taken pictures of the church and ask a few questions regarding the filming.

Both churches have many perks and it will be difficult to chose. St. Michaels is a 10 minute walk from school, so an ideal place to film and a place that is local to the entire group. However, the problems we are worrying about at the moment are that there will not be enough room or objects may get in the way of filming. This is only based on the picture we have seen from the website, so we need to visit to make sure. We would also have to check specific dates with the church which may become a problem if we need to re-film some parts, but the vicar seemed happy to help us in his e-mail. Stone St. Mary's church is further away from where we all live, and may pose problems for actors getting there. However because Ollie can get keys to the church, it would be ideal as we could film almost whenever we wanted to.

Finding the Actors

We began to look for people that could play the desired instruments in our video. The most tricky role to fill was the cello, as it is quite rare that people play it. We began to ask around and see who is reliable to perform in our video.
We decided that the band members should be wearing smart/casual clothing, ideally blazers and shirts or shirts and ties. This formal look will fit better with out video and also with the church setting.
Here are some examples of how clothing changed with the setting of a video:

We began to fill the roles of our music video and came up with this list of actors:

Mike-Drums
Dan-Lead Singer
Ollie-Cello/Violin

Luckily, Ollie can play both the cello and the violin, and also knows people who play the violin. This was very handy because it means that we had a choice of who to cast, something we didn't think we would get with the violin and the cello. Ollie also knows a church in Greenhithe that would be happy to let us use the church as a setting, and Ollie could get keys, so gaining access when it suited us best wouldn't be a problem.

Finding The Right Setting

We began to look for an ideal church to set our music video in. We need to find a local church, preferably with a stained glass window, and we need to ask permission to firstly look around the church and whether we would be able to perform inside the church.

We would have to ask what day would be best to film on and whether everything we want in our music video can be filmed there.
We decided to email a few churches local to us and see what their responses would be to our ideas.

We decided that the churches needed to be local to us and easy to get to. The e-mail above is to a church near to Alfie's house, which made it ideal because it was so close.

The church close to Alfie's house was our first reply, and we decided to ask whether we could look around and see whether it was an ideal place to set our video.

We looked at our timetables and decided that the most convenient time to go would be on a Tuesday afternoon, and we could all meet after lunch at school. The church is only a 10 minute walk from our school so this made it easy for us to meet.

Thankfully, Richard e-mailed back saying that this was a good time to meet, and that he would see us on Tuesday. When we visit the church, we will take pictures of the setting, and ask various questions about setting up in the church.