Dear Moderator

Dear Moderator

A note to say that as of this post i have completed my A2 Coursework

Ben Corcoran

Digi-pack Panes together

Evaluation 4- Production

Here i Will List the New equipment that prviously was not used in Pre- Production

Equipment:

The use of a Lighting Studio was something that could not be used for the process of pre production due to restrictions to the areas that we could go and the access was limited in the studio. But for Production we later had the ability to use this piece of of equipment. The main use of the studio was in the construction of the video itself. Our video featured Studio Scenes of performance aspect and we needed them in order to make our video look genuine, this in turn required us to experiment and try out different lighting techniques. There were a total of 13 different light in the studio and in order to get the right one we needed to try out all of them. If we had not used the studio the video would have been lacking in the performance scenes due to poor lighting.

Video Cameras were again used here in order to acomplish the main bulk of the filming. This in combination with the tripod was the only filming equipment that we needed to use for our filming. Other types of camera were avalible to us such as the Go Pro but since this was not needed it would have been a waste of time to use it.

SLR Cameras were used also in the Production Stage. These would have been used in the ancillary tasks for this project so that would be the Digi-pack and the Magazine Advert. In order to achieve the desired effect SLR cameras were used in place of digital cameras, this is because the quality of the picture is better, the image is sharper and they generally produce a higher standard of picture. They were used during the photoshoot we took for the Digi-pack and the Magazine advert. The shoot consisted of around 40 photos and

Programs:

Again Final Cut Pro and Audio Hijack were used in the creation of the Main Bulk of the Music Video. They were used to similar effect to the preliminary tasks so there is no need to touch up anymore on this.

Adobe Photoshop was a new Program that was used in the Production Stage

Evaluation 4 - Pre Production

For this evaluation i will split up the question into four parts Pre-production, Production and Post Production. This will allow me to give more structured answers and will alow for ease of reading and orginising of information.

Pre-Production:


Websites:

Blogger is the first website that all of us used in the time of our project. We used this particular website in the use of presenting our work throughout the entire project. In pre production more specifically we needed to use it in order to present our first tasks which were posts on the conventions of genres, our frame by frame analysis, research onto media theorists and we also presented various information regarging the major task, so things like song research and song choices.


Youtube was also a website that was used to great lengths during the pre production. It was used for the purpose of research mainly and was a good way of gathering video clips throughout the project. In pre production it was used to gather song choices and was very useful for finding music as well. Another Key use for Youtube was to gather screenshots for various posts throuought the stage of pre production. Like in our conventions posts which featured many screenshots, all of these came from Youtube videos that have been cut from the screenshot tool on the Macs.

Wikipedia was also a used Website. It was useful for researching various fact that may be present in the blog posts. However this was not as widely used as the other websites seen on this list because of it is not always 100% accurate so I would be using other smaller websites for this.

 

 

 

 

Finally the other major website that i used for Pre-production was Google. Google is a Search engine so it was mainly used for the research and planning stage. If i needed information on any band or any theorist I would use Google first, this would link me to relevent sites with the information that i needed. The information gathered in the conventions stage, the other various misc information that may be on the blog will have come from google. Google images has also been useful for the Process of gathering visual evidence. If ever i need an image for anything i will most likely have found it from google images.

 

 

Equipment:

 

Video Camera's were used primarily for research and planning stage of pre production. Our first Test Film of a Music Video was done on a Video camera. The Entire filming process was completed using a camera. Another task that was done was the frame by frame reconstruction of a music video. For our group we did Ed Sheerans- Lego House . The main advantage of the cameras was that we could film lengthy videos as opposed to just photographs. Another task that was completed with the Video cameras were the Audience research tasks where we filmed our interviews. This gave us the accuracy and the level of detail of what the interviewees actually said. The Cameras themselves were lightweight and hand held so they could be used for all kinds of location scouting and researching.



 

The Tripod was an addon to the camera so the tasks that it went with would have been exactly the same as the Camera. With the exeption that it was usefull for keeping the camera steady in the videos, which is crucial to the success and quality of the video.

 

Macs were the main computors that were used for the entire project. For pre Production it was nessesary to use macs because of the applications and programs that were on them which wernt on Windows computors.

 

List of Mac Programs:

 

Final Cut Pro was perhaps the most used program in pre production. The Major tasks that involved Final Cut Pro were the Practicle task- Frame by frame. This program was responsible for the process of gathering already filmed clips from the Video cameras that were mentioned earlier, and storing them on the macs. Then it will be the main tool for any Editing Job that needed to be done. This program is good for editing because it features tools that help with the editing such as the Cut tool, the crop tool and the Colour correction tool. It is also useful for ordering the various clips in the desired order to make any video run smoothly without any jumps. It was also used at the start of the year during our Lip Sync task. It is also good for this because it features tools which alows you to edit in time with background music making asy to make accurate lip syncing.

 

 

 



Audio Hijack was also a frequently used Mac program. This was responsible for getting soundtracks of off the website Youtube and making them into an Mp3 form, which could then be used in Final Cut Pro as the Music soundtrack which we would edit our music too. The task used were the Lip Syncing task and the Frame by Frame reconstruction.



Evaluation part 3

Evaluation Question 2

Q2:

How effective is the combination of your Ancillery task and Main Task?

The Ancillery Tasks that we had to create for our task were in eccence a support sturcture, a support task for the main task which was our video. The Two Ancillery tasks were The Digi-pack and The Magazine advert were extensions for the main task which was a Music Video for the British indie Rock band The Arctic Monkeys. The Ancillery tasks were ment to follow the task by also following the conventions and styles which were portrayed in the video.

Evaluation Part 1

Evaluation Question 1:



In what way does your Media Product use, Develop or challange Forms and Conventions of real Media Products?



Digi-Pack:



For the Digi-pack we firstly conformed to the conventions when it came to the physical layout of the Digi-pack. For us it was a strait up choice between Four panes or Six panes, because these were what almost every conventional digipack would have. In the end we decided to use the 4 Panes instead of 6. So in This department we have stuck to the conventions of the album. After this point we then had to be more specific with the conventions. We needed to delve into the more specific conventions of the Indie Rock Genre and Even more Specifically the Arctic Monkeys Style for our digipack. In order to do this I looked at previous digipack from bands and albums from the same genre as well as some from The Arctic Monkeys. The One convention i found was that the genre has a profound effect on the way a Digi-pack is constructed. For Our Genre of Indie Rock there is generally a more creative aspect to the works. Art is common or photoshoots. In this regards we felt it unwise to challenge the conventions, because we wanted to present the correct image and we didnt want any confusion as to what the genre of the Album Was. In order to conform to these conventions we decided that the best thing to do was to do a photoshoot because neither of us had the skill to do a painting. Of course we had both used editing programs in the past so we had the skill to edit photos to the specification that we wanted. The First thing during Editing was to make the images Black and White as is custom for the Genre. We wanted to go for a simple look that still looked genuine. So we decided to Use Simple Imagery with a Simple Text. Despite this i still think that we have stuck to the conventions of the Genre and achieved A High Finish. Another Crucial component for any digipack is the information that it portrays on the back pane. Usually this will remain true among most albums of any Genre so it will include Track Listings, Legal Information, copyright information and any additional info that may be required. For our album we felt it a necessity to have these things in our digi pack because without it, it would have been just a picture. This is not what we wanted. For the Image itself we drew on a picture from the same shoot, that way it is obvious that the pictures are in some way related to one another. We used the same Editing process as with the front image and used the same font as before. One final Addition that was made to our digi-pack was a false company logo. It is named BMC production which are my initials, because this wasn't a Huge point of the Digi-pack i didn't give to much thought into the name as that would have wasted time. The Logo was in some ways drawing influence from the GUP logo but any similarities are purely iconic. This is key because all bands have some sort of record label to their name and in this respect we held true to this convention.



Magazine Advert:



The Magazine Advert was the second part of our Ancillery Tasks. For this we had to look at previous examples from multiple magazines. One Convention that we found here is that the image in a Magazine Advert is usually always the same as that of an album. This is one convention that we broke in order to do something else. We Used a different image for the use of our magazine advert. We decided on this because it would give the band a more contrasting look, plus it was slightly more creative than just using the same Image from our album. However the image that we used was not completely abstract. We used a different image from the photo shoot that we did. The shoot consisted of about 40 images which all had a common style about them so each one was fairly similar to the others. Another convention that we needed according to what was on other magazine adverts was Appropriate reviews. What I mean is that we would have to look at reviewers who will review Indie Rock bands commonly, people who are more likely to review the band of our choice. In the end we decided on NME which is more likely to review our band than others. So this is a convention we felt was crucial to uphold in order to get a more convincing piece of work. Another aspect of information we needed to explore was the idea of information on the magazine advert. Generally there is a fair amount of information such as The Album Name, Copyright Information, release date. We Challenged the conventions of this ad put slightly different information on our Advert. Firstly We did not put any sort of release date on it. The reasoning behind this decision was because we were unclear as to what date would be most likely to seem feasible due to the apparent random nature of album release dates. We put limited Copyright information on the advert, similar to that on the Digipacks Back pane.



Music Video:



This was our primary task in the whole project, in this respect it was bound most by the conventions of other works of media. In order to get a feel for conventions we really had to look at previous examples of  music video. This time however we had to look purely at Indie Rock videos because every genre has very different conventions so it would be redundant to look at Pop videos for instance. We looked at examples from Arctic Monkeys, Foo Fighters, Muse, The Verve, Radiohead and other Indie Music Videos. We found that the main aspects of indie encourage more music and narrative aspects to them. There are usually lots of performance shots and there is in many cases some form of narrative in them also, even if they have no relation to the lyrics of the song itself. Also the mis-en-scen in these videos is also crucial to the feel of the indie rock videos. Clothing is usually basic and uninteresting; something like a T-shirt and jeans would do for an indie rock video. In these first conventions that I mentioned, so the Performance, Narrative and Mis-en-scen are all conventions that we confirmed to in order to avoid confusion of the genre of music that we were trying to promote.

Music Video

Digi-pack Inside Panes

This is the part of the Digipack that would be seen when the album is opened. In this case the inside will consist of 2 panes, the same as the outside panes. The Inside panes were not done by me however, they were done by the other member of the group but we coordinated the styles to make them seem like they are from the same album.



Inside is the first image that will be used for the inside panes. This is the inside front pane so it will be the pane on the opening section of the pane. The Other image we decided to leave blank puerly for the reason that we felt that it wasnt nessecery, mainly because it is the pane with the CD on it but there is a simple artwork to it.

Magazine Cover

 Below is part 2 of our ancillery task. The Magazine Covers. In order to Create our magazine advert firstly we had too look at already existing magzine adverts in order to get a feel for what the conventions were and what needed to go into the advert cover.

The first thing that I discovered is that there generally is a common convention  which is apparent with all types of genre. The is almost always some sort of artwork which in many cases is actually the album artwork. Below is our Magazine Advert.

 

One thing that we have challanged with this particular attempt is that we didnt use the same image as the front pane of our digi-pack as is custom with most magazine adverts. However the image itself is not that abstract because it is from the same photoshoot. The only thing that we really did with the original image is black and white the image and we also made the image size smaller so that it would fit on the canvas. Another important addition to the advert was the use of appropriate companies. A Label like NME would be more llikely to do a review of our song than other labels and reviewers.

Digi-pack Front Pane

The front pane of our digi pack was done by Me. I was tasked with doing the entire front cover for our album and to do this i had to follow the conventions of the genre that we chose and also following the conventions of the Arctic Monkeys as well. The dimensions for the Front pane would be 600 x 537 pixels which is common among most Digi-pack front covers.

The first thing that I needed to do was to pick an Image for the Front cover, something that could be edited and changed in order to create the desired effect. Above is the Image that I selected for the front cover. I chose this picture because it shows the face in a manner that can be seen as related to the back pane. Also it follows the conventions of the Genre in that many use images and the Arctic monkeys specifically use faces in some of their album designs.

The Next thing that I needed to do was to make the Image Black and white. I did this because I had already created my back cover, which was also done in black and white, so in order to avoid contrast in colours i needed to make this pane black and white as well. Another problem at the moment is that the image size does not meet the size of the dimensions needed in order to accurately make the digi-pack.

In order to meet the dimensions that i needed the image would have to be made smaller. In order to do that. The original dimensions of the image were 4928 x 3264 pixels which was much bigger than the 600 x 537 pixels that I needed to make the digi-pack an accurate size. There may be some slight change to the original image in that it may be crushed or skewed slightly but I have done my best to try and reduce that. Even if there is it will be minimal and would be indistinguishable.

Lastly I added a simple logo which represents the band that we are using. The creative aspect of it may not be great but it does follow the conventions of the band which is the effect that I was going for. The font of the Text is American Typewriter which i chose because It looks like the kind of thing that would appear on the front covers of some album in the indie genre section.

The main thing that was achieved here was linking the front pane to the back. This is crucial because if they are not in some way connected then the overall product will not look right. The two inside panes will again be similar to the front as well in order to avoid any unnecessary contrast in design

Interviews

Above is our First interview in order to 

Here is Interview Number two

This Lesson...

This lesson I have been working on question 4 of my Evaluation. I have done this by Making a plan for it. The plan is basically a checklist which includes what I need to talk about in my Question, because I intend to do a Video recording of myself talking about the various Things that I have used.

Evaluation part 4 plan

Pre-production:

Websites: 

• Blogger
• Youtube- Research
• Wikipedia- Research
• Google- Search engine

Equipment:

• Camera- Video
• Camera- SLR
• Tripod
• Mac
• Headphones

Production:

Equipment:

• Camera - Video
• Camera - SLR
• Tripod
• Mac
• Lighting Studio
• Headphones

Websites:

• Youtube- Song Choice, play song

Post-production:

Mac Programs:

• Final Cut Pro- Editing
• Adobe Photoshop- Digi pack designing, Magazine Cover

This Post is used to give me a plan in order to make sense of what i need to say in my evaluation for question 4.

This lesson...

Today I have successfully been able to create and complete my Digi-pack front pane. In addition to this I Had to make sure the back pane was compatible with the back pane. I found that it was not so either the back or front pane needed to be slightly changed. I decided to focus on editing the back pane because there was not much I could do to the front due to the lack of things on it. Luckely the back pane wasnt a big task and the only thing that i really changed was the font on the back to American Typewriter. My evaluation was also Started.

Digi-pack Back pane

This lesson I have been working on my back pane.  As part of our overall 4 pane digipack. I first needed an image which we did a photo shoot with an SLR camera. I have done it step by step in order to give an overvieew of the process.

Above is the original image that was used in photoshop. I decided on this Image because one convention of  indie Album covers is to have images of people, back covers more specifically have have images in reverse so they will often feature the backs of peoples heads and in this case i wanted to continue with this. One problem with leaving the image as it is, is that the image size is too large in dimension size. The dimensions of this image are 4928 x 3264 pixels compared with the image size we decided on which was 600 x 537 pixels. So the image itself would have to be made smaller in order to make it fit.

Above is the Edited image. Firstly i adjusted it to the correct dimension in order to fit our digipack. This image uses the correct decided dimensions which were 600 x 537 .Then I decided that in order to create the desired effect I needed to black and white the image, similar to what was done to the Album Whatever People Say I Am, Thats What Im Not. This has created the image that I wanted. This was the basis for the entire back pane and now i could begin to Add the details that had to be put onto i tin order for the piece to look authentic.

This image is the same image as the ones above only now it has been given company information in the form of a Logo. The logo in the shot is firstly not a real company it is a company that has been invented for the purposes of this project only and was not intended to cop any previous company name. To the left of this text is an enlarged version of the Logo. Inspiration was drawn from the Logo for the clothes logo GUP and the three letter combination was drawn from real life record labels Like NME. The Barcode is also a crucial part of the design because we are selling this as if it were a real product so it would need to have this feature, because every other physical digi-pack would have one. For the most pare the Barcode is on the back so i decided to stay with the convention.

The next thing that needed to be added was the track listings. In order to accomplish this with great accuraccy Firstly somewhere we needed to put our song their and secondly, because it was an album we needed to put other tracks on their as well. This left me with a choice, Invent other song titles or use already existing songs from the artist of our choice. I decided with the latter because it would have been difficult to invent new song titles in the stile of the Arctic Monkeys because there is no common theme to draw upon and each song is different in subject to another. In order to pick the songs i found a list containing all their songs. The only thing that i wanted to avoid was putting songs together that were from existing Albums because this wouldn't have been quite a unique product if i did. There are a few songs that are from the same album but they are not an exact replica.

Lastly I made the decision to change the font of the Back pan from PortagoITC TT to American Typewriter. I decided to do this because I felt that it was a more appropriate font for our target audience, the original font was too big and bold for it to be believable for an Indie band. This was my decision to do this but I feel that it has payed off.

This Lesson...

This Lesson I was able to Design and Finish my Digi-pack back pane. Since we have allocated the digipack panes equally between two i am half way to doing my share of the digipack. After the front pane is done i will stop work on the digipack and allow Jack to do his half of the work. Only fair. Their is an issue with the screen grabs but hopefully i will have these done by the end of the week.

Digi-pack Back pane research

The back pane of our Digi-pack will be created and researched by me. In regards to the conventions of pretty much every album from every genre, the back pane will have a direct connection to the Front pane. This can be either an extension of the original image, a reverse shot of an image or another image that is connected to the image. For the more specific genre of Indie they do pretty much agree and use these conventions in their own albums. Another key factor that has to be adressed is that the back pane has lots more information about the album and band than the front. Common conventions include Track listings, Copyright information, company logos and additional legal information. Some examples below from Arctic Monkeys.

Whatever People say I am, Thats What Im Not















Favorite Worst Nightmare

Both these are from Arctic Monkeys albums and they are relevent to the front pane (see front pane research) because they are almost extensions of them.

Evidence of copyright

Below is the letter that was typed to be deliverd to the distributing company for the Arctic Monkeys. We are not expecting a reply but we felt it was required that we actually have the evidence to avoid copyright laws.

Digi-pack Front Pane research

The front pane of our Digi-pack will be made by me. I feel that our front pane should be a photograph. I feel this because we need to stick to the conventions of the band and the genre in general. Photographs are present in many indie rock title because they are a form of art and it can take very creative aspects in order to do them. Below are some examples.

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I' m Not

Favorite Worst Nightmare 

Humbug


















There is a recurring theme in these and that is that each album is in fact a photograph. They may be edited but they are still photos. Another thing that i can comment on is the font use. There is no universal font style of convention so it gives us a broader and more diverse choice of font. Again we can attempt to be more creative with it.

The dimensions of the front cover will be 600 x 537 pixels as recommended by various online sources. I agree with this because it is still the conventional shape of a digipack.

Rough Cut

Digipack plan

For our Album cover/Digipack we have planned to make in in accordance with the conventions of Indie. We Have multiple ideas about what our digipack could be like. We will either use a more artistic approach to the design with some kind of drawing like such albums as Muse.

Another approach is the photography approach to it.

The Layout:

There are two possible layouts that can be used for the actual production but these two designs only really affect the number of panes which will be either 4 or 6.

Here is an example of a 4 pane Digipack:

And Here is a good example of a 6 pane Digipack:

For the one we would actually use it is still open for debate but to give ourselves more breathing space for more ideas we may do the 6 panel edition for our one because it gives us a good reason to put extra creative things into our digipack where a 4 panel one may hinder us and force us to choose.

The Content:

It is important however to stick to the conventions of previous digipacks because they include everything needed to make it official which is the look we are looking for. A Traditional Digipack will usually include Track Listings, CD casing, Information about the Artist /Band, Images related to that particular album. For our Digipack we will have to be careful about what we put into it because we are using an existing Artists name so we will need to abide by their conventions when it comes to Track listings and the style of the pack itself. Below is an example from the Bands Second album Favourite Worst Nightmare:

This is something that is fairly feasible to do because it is essentially a series of photos which is something that can be replicated. Of course the images themselves will not be the same but the whole Idea of using Photographs is one of the things that i mentioned that we could do.

Progress Update...

A quick update on a recent problem that has developed which may hinder our progress. Exterior shots may become a continuity problem due to a sudden downpour of Snow. This will effect shots, location, and travel which will impede our progress and we may have to make adjustments due to the weather we may have to wait for the snow to thaw out.