Completed Music Video, CD Booklet & Website

Our completed website can be accessed here and was created using the free website builder called Wix.

All of the images for the CD front cover, reverse and booklet can be viewed below.

This is our completed music video.



Evaluation: Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

This is the link to my Gliffy which I used to create a flowchart for my answer to question 4.

Evaluation: Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?



When we requested our audience feedback, we did so with the use of online forums. This was designed to create impartial views of the video and that personal relationships with the people viewing the music video would not affect the results in anyway.

Their overall views collectively was that it was an entertaining video. Most of the people who commented fall into the categories of audiences which we have focused on from the Life Matrix tool and the Uses & Gratifications theory and this means that we accurately created a music video which conforms to the audience which we aimed at.

In terms of constructive criticism, the feedback was mostly based on post-production elements of the video and little recording would have been required. "At 1:29 (when there are additional vocals in the background), you should do the split-screen that you did in 1:59, but without the blur and get the other guy to sing/lip-sync the BG vocals." This response for example is one of the responses which focused more on the post-production side of the music video production. However, would have also required the possibility of recording extra parts to satisfy this which is an issue due to the time in which we had remaining after comments were received.

"I think you did a pretty great job already. I get the story you tried to put on film. There is a lot of fading though. At some points a bit too much where it becomes difficult to follow what is even happening." This was another example where the post-production element was needed for which the music video would be improved. This, on the other hand, was one of the comments which we were able to act on and the draft which was shown to them contains much more fades and transition than the completed video.

The overall view to the actors was negative and many people commented saying it was what held the video back from looking 'professional'. Some of the comments stated "I guess nothing can be done about the actors?" and "the lack in acting skill". Unfortunately as the deadline for the music video's completion was close approaching we were unable to act on that feedback as it would have required a lot of reshooting to make the energy of the music translate through the proxemics and actions of the actors.

In order to help support the feedback from before, we held a preview screening of our music video along with other music videos from other groups in our class and with the feedback, the general trends were the same as with the comments from the forums posts. The key issues were the use of fading's which hindered the flow of the narrative and the lack of acting quality.

The last feedback we were given was from our media teacher, he requested that we add glitch or distortion effects into our music video to give the music video a sense of unrest throughout the course of the video. We decided to look online for some new effects as the effects available on Premiere Pro were limiting when it came to distorting and glitching the video. We used effects available to create the distortion and glitch in the video.

We also asked for brief feedback on the album artwork and the website to gauge peoples opinions of the ancillary tasks. From the feedback we received from the people in my media class, the general trend was the need for cutting the prints more precise as it was slightly uneven. However, the remainder of the feedback is positive with comments saying it was "professional looking" and that "people would buy that in shops".

Evaluation: Question 2

How effective is the combination of your product and ancillary tasks?

Evaluation: Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Created with Padlet

Stylistic Influences of Artwork

Whilst attempting to subvert from the themes by the original artist, we did attempt to take some influence from other artists, directors and music videos etc.

Our CD cover was created based on the idea that it had to have some form of link to the accompanying music video. This was loosely influenced by Oasis' Definitely Maybe album which contained images linking to several of their music videos, mainly seen through the way both the cover and the videos were edited visually. (Similar colour schemes and shading for desired emotional response)

 

We decided to take this more literally and included an image taken directly from a clip we intend to use in our video that we took while location scouting in order to draw a clear link between this and our video when it is finished, much like Oasis did with every video from the album.

 

Our video itself was influenced by several different sources and we took a lot of influence from the idea of the 'Mini Movie' craze that has become far more popular in recent years. We were however cautions of the criticisms of this idea with several artists (Most notably Dave Grohl from the 'Foo Fighters') believing it to be ruining the idea of the music video. Based on this, we made our story slightly less obvious, deciding against including any dialogue or in fact a traditional narrative.

The CD Booklet's Contents

This is the contents of our CD booklet in the printed format.

Account of Meetings

During the course of the project, we made clear we need to meet consistently to produce the video and ancillaries to a high standard. We organised this by using a spreadsheet that all of us had access to during the task to decide when to meet up and the tasks we would set out to at the meeting. The spreadsheet mentioned is shown below.

Shoot Plan & Mise-En-Scene of the Website

Mise-en-Scene:
For our website we have decided to subvert from a lot of the conventions used by the original artist.
We will utilise screenshots from our final production piece and landscape shots taken when filming in order to make up the background, as opposed to Madeon who used a landscape artwork rather than a real picture. This background will be enhanced in order to be the middle ground between the two contrasting moods in the video. This will be the tone throughout the rest of the website.
The information will be laid out in a very simple and easy to use way through the use of tabs linking to different pages and large text boxes with information displayed in a simple list form.
The conventions of the genre and of music in general will be conveyed through the frequent use of the artists logo and brand.


Colour Scheme:
we have chosen to use several different vibrant colours for the text boxes and the text itself. This was an attempt to adhere to the conventions of the genre. This was decided through the frequent use of neon and strobe lighting seen in different music videos categorised in the same genre and is something we will pay homage to.
The background may make the text colour difficult to choose as it is likely to consist of several different colours which may blend the text in. We will attempt to counteract this by adding a translucent layer behind the text to help distinguish the text from the background.


Below is the homepage of Madeon's official website:

Making The Website

Over the past few weeks we have been creating a website as an ancillary task to accompany the video and the CD cover.

We decided to use the webpage creator Wix to get the best possible design for our website. We chose a template which had a similar look to what we were hoping to make and began to edit. This was the original template's home page which appeared to need a lot of work to change. Firstly, we needed to change the background to something more appropriate to our project (which would feature on all of the pages that follow) after several different backgrounds were tested, we opted for a scenic screen capture from our video which we then had to edit so that the lighting and colours allowed for text to be viewed. We also removed the large icon and text from the centre and replace it with a large title of our artist to be placed at the very top of the page. The social media links were also moved and were each linked to Madeon's official pages.
The navigation buttons at the bottom were only added to this page whilst the ones at the top remained in the header on the rest of the pages.

The News page was fairly straight forward in terms of the design. We simply split the text box which scrolled down the page into two parts in order to have everything instantly seen without the need to scroll down as this affected the size of the background picture. Once we had finished doing that, we were able to fill in the information with events including the plan for the music video and the release of the song we were covering. We also decided at this point to colour code each page, making the boxes red throughout as opposed to the flashing multi-coloured ones that were originally there.

We did a followed a near identical process for the news page, splitting the text box and adding in information about a tour including dates, location and price.

For the music page, we had to replace the music app that already existed and opted for YouTube clips with links to the same songs on iTunes.  We had originally had 4 videos on the page, however due to the aspect ratio on certain computers, not all could be viewed properly.

We decided to completely scrap the bio page as it was not vital to the website and it didn't seem to blend very well with the other content.

We created our own brand new Store page which frequently features on real artists' websites selling merchandise etc. We added images of genuine Madeon merchandise and made some realistic prices to acconpany them.

The header contains the Artist's title alongside the logo From the initial 'M'. This logo is also a button that links directly to the homepage.

Shoot Plan & Mise-En-Scene of Album Artwork

As we began filming, we took into consideration the house style of the entire project. We discussed that it would be best to have the artwork and the website be in a similar style to the music video. We came across a metal gate (which had obviously had something strike it) so we used that as a base for the front and back cover.

As we picked the dates to film the music video, we decided we would use certain shots from the film to use in the artwork. We particuarly emphasised on the mise en scene and the proxemics of the characters. We chose the brighter looking shots to use for the postive protagonist whereas we used negative shots to use for the negative character. This was done with the lighting from each shot and the cinema style effects which were used in Photoshop to make the different characters different within each image of the album artwork. In addition to lighting and effects. We also tried to make the sky more visible in the postive characters images rather than the negative one to promote the sence of isolation within those images.

Green Screen Practice

Today we practiced the use of editing with green screens. As a result, we used the colour key in Premiere Pro to create this.

Editing & Effects Practice

We have been testing and playing around with various effects both from the Premiere Pro program itself and from 3rd party sources such as RampantMedia which we got the glitch/grunge effects from which we have practiced in the video above.

The effects were available with this YouTube instructional video which gave us instructions on how to make the effects work well with the video it affects. In the effects package, we received 4k resoultion clips which we placed over clips and then change the settings little by little and to tweak the footage in order to give the best possible outcome with the effects overlaying the video.

The instructional video we used is below and it walked through how to do everything in a simple way.

Editing The Music Video & Feedback

We have almost finished editing the music video for our project. We have all the clips placed in the sequence timeline and have begun the rigorous process of adding effects to make the video perfect in every aspect.

In order to achieve the best transitions and effects in the video, we ended up placing clips into a total of 5 different video tracks across the course of the video to be able to make the transitions flow and the effects to be enhanced during the transitions.

The amount of effects we are able to use on Premiere Pro is huge and with that we have the freedom to pick and choose as we feel and that the chances of finding an effect which enhances the picture in the way that we want is high.






In addition to this, I have began requesting feedback on the current edit of the video from various people I know.



This was the current edit of the music video which I have shown people and they have responded accordingly:

I have begun using the feedback from these comments and the comments of my other classmates and my teacher in order to make sure the video is of highest quality.

One of the comments which I have acted upon mostly was that the video included too many fades as transition and that the difference between characters emotions weren't always obvious. Through this I have removed fades and have been using various effects to make the difference in characters emotion obvious with the use of luma keying and reducing the brightness in the depressed characters shots and the use of colour changing, colour correction, enhancing the brightness and saturation and using sharpening effects on some shots to make the emotions of the happy character evident.

Filming Days 4 & 5 (13-14/02/16)

We filmed for both Saturday and Sunday in order to film the remaining shots to finish the music video and to shift our project into the post-production stage. We filmed on the Saturday all the remaining shots on our storyboard for the break, build-up and both drops in the song in order to have enough footage to complete the video. On the Sunday we filmed extra shots in case some of the shots we recorded on previous days were useless. The shooting schedule for Saturday is here and for Sunday it is here.

We used the schools booking system again to make sure we had all the equipment necessary to record our music video.

Contributor Release Forms

In order to film our music video, we had to sign the release form in order to ensure all the credit for creating the music video. Brad's form, Matt's form and my form are all available on Google Drive. The terms of our release forms are:

Creating The CD Booklet & Album Artwork

I began designing the artwork for the CD booklet and cover in early February and since then I have progressed a lot on the artwork for the booklet and cover.





I have been going into detail on photoshop to make sure all the colours were exactly how I wanted them to be.

At times, I was changing the colours pixel by pixel to make sure the colours were as precise as I had wanted.







In addition to colour correction with the artwork especially. I began using various effects which Photoshop offers such as gradient changing, brightness and vibrance altering, photo filtering, changing the colour curves of the image and many more. I did this to make sure that all the images had a warm effect on them and to give them the slight sunset tint to each image in order to make the image look effective to the audience.






It also required a lot of time to superimpose the text of the front and back covers to the signs which I pictured when I was out recording the music video.

The content in the booklet was relatively similar to the artwork in the use of effects to make the image have a warm effect. In addition, the CD booklet content had to contain small text in order to fill all the vocals from one song on the page. In order to achieve that I used the stroke effect to give a white outline of the black text making it easy to read whilst it being small.





Using Adobe Illustrator I was able to begin piecing each part of the booklet together on a template which makes it ready to print in the size required to fit inside a CD case.

 

 

From the images we took when filming of some signs attached to a broken gate, we were able to create the idea for our front and rear covers for our album. With the effects and techniques above, we were able to create the front and rear covers different to its original sourced image. With the rear cover especially, it took time in order to remove the reflection of the sun from the image to make sure the rear cover was perfect.

Risk Assessment For Filming The Music Video

We filled out a risk assessment form to assess the dangers that existed when we were filming for our music video. From what we found out for the location scout of for the music video, we were able to accurately distinguish the dangers that were there when we were filming and we came to the conclusion that the risk of injury (minor injuries in particular) were trivial.

Copyright Request

We decided to email the management for Madeon in a hope that we are granted the rights to use the song in our music video. We are using the song for educational purposes and for non-profit purposes so we hope that they respond giving us the legal rights to use the song in this way.

Filming Day 3 (30/01/16)

We continued filming this weekend on the Saturday only due to illness cancelling the Sunday recording session. We have the shooting schedule for Saturday here.

Today we planned to record all the lip syncing shots in order to get a basis of what we need to record after to place in the gaps of the video. We recorded most of the lip syncing shots (and also made Brad very cold and murderous) in this recording session. This day was very productive as we were able to record the lip syncing shots with the aid of our storyboard. All we need to record now is the storyboarded shots for the video during the break, buildup, drop and outro of the song.

Again we used the schools booking system to ensure we had all the equipment necessary to continue filming our music video.

Character Profiles

In order to effectively convey the narrative of our music video, the characters had to be very well planned out and contrasting. As we opted for a narrative which contrasted two different moods throughout, the characters had to be complete polar opposites in terms of emotion and dress sense. We also plan to contrast them with the use of the weather when filming and effects in post-production.

Happy character:
This character is to be portrayed as the stereotypical teenager who's actions frequently suggest he has not got a care in the world.
The emotions conveyed through actions and facial expressions will be viewed as being overall positive.
The miss en scene (especially costume) will be presented in the most positive way possible. For example, his attire will consist of bright colours and will make him appear quite smart and well put together. (The colour and lighting may also be changed during post production in order to convey this)

Sad character:
In contrast to the only other character in this production, this character subverts from the dominant stereotype and is portrayed as a much darker, more morbid person. The aim is to convey the message that unfortunate events have caused this character pain and he is try in to deal with it in whatever way possible.
Similarly, the facial expressions and mise en scene play key roles The portrayal of this character.
The costume will consist of darker and more depressing colours and will attempt to be similar clothes to that which is stereotypically worn by unsavoury characters.

Goodwin's 'Conventions Theory' & Halls 'Reception Theory'

Goodwin's theory is about genre conventions and their stereotypical characteristics. It looks at 7 different principles:

- Links between lyrics and visuals
- Genre characteristics
- Intertextual references
- Notions of looking; similar to the Male Gaze theory
- Voyeurism; the enjoyment of watching/ looking at the artist
- Demands of the record label
- Performance, narrative or concept based music videos.

When looking at the house music genre of music videos and the music video for our song, 'Finale' by Madeon, we noticed differing styles that the music video uses in comparison to other music videos. In 'Finale', there is a focus on the artist and there is a narrative of him performing at a live show. While there are shots of the artist, very few are clear; ruling out the belief that the audience watches the music video to look at the artist. The lyrics and visuals don't often match, but the use of 'go out young' with the audience appearing to be of that age group shows that is it not out of the question.

Other music videos of the genre also tend to use the performance/narrative with some intertexual references for their niche audience. There may be some links with visuals but will often depend on the lyrics and if it possible to make any graphic matches.

Hall's reception theory is how the audience view the music video and it's messages. There are three readings that the audience may have to a music video:

- Dominant - the viewer accepts the points made in the video.
- Negotiated - the viewer partly accepts the points but may question elements of the video.
- Oppositional - the viewer totally rejects the points made in the video.

The music video for Madeon's 'Finale' has very few controversial points, and is mainly about how the artist feels during a performance. Therefore, it is most likely people will have the dominant view of the video.

Few music videos of this genre raise controversial points due to already appealing to a niche audience. If so, the fan-base of the artist may possibly agree with the controversial points.

Brand Development

We created this Glogster to illustrate how we improved on the designs of our products in order to make them stand out with a clear house style and layout. We also did this to promote the brand identity and the image of the artist which we want the audience to view.

Brand Development

Textual Analysis: Varien's 'The Ancient & Arcane' Album Artwork

Filming Days 1 & 2 (09-10/01/16)

We began filming this weekend on the Saturday and the Sunday. We have the shooting schedule for Saturday here and the schedule for Sunday here. We did have some technical issues which led us to cut filming early on the Saturday, however we caught up with our schedule by shooting more footage on the Sunday.

In the recording we did do, we decided to focus on the introduction and ending of our music video so we could create a foothold on recording the music video as a whole. We have been using our storyboard to aid us in which shots to record and for how many bars in the song it will be recorded for.

We booked our equipment from the schools booking site and we hired the camera and the tripod for the weekend.

Consuming Habits of the Dance Music Industry

The consuming habits of the dance music scene are different to that of the mainstream scene. The dance scene is often seen as the most digitalised scene with artists releasing singles of extended plays (EP) through digital marketplaces only. Some artists will release long plays (LP), these albums are normally sold physically on the record labels website as well as through the digital marketplaces.

The dance music scene is record label orientated and releases are hyped up before the release of the song in order to gain a wider audience. They often do this by posting previews on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In addition, the song will be previewed on Soundcloud; a website designed for music sharing and is most prominent for the dance music scene.

Most people consume dance music through the releases and purchasing on digital marketplaces. Beatport is the most prominent marketplace where record labels such as Spinnin’ Records and Bourne Recordings will release on Beatport exclusively before a release on another digital marketplace like iTunes and Amazon. In addition to this, the consuming habits of some dance music audiences has shifted to music piracy as people now begin to download the music illegally.

From this research we gathered, we have discovered that in order to reach a wider audience, it will be useful to sign the song onto a record label. In addition to this, we would release previews and hype the release up on our social media pages, website and on our Soundcloud page. In addition, we should offer a physical copy for purchase on our website.

Storyboard of Madeon's "Finale" Music Video

This is the storyboard for our production and with this, it will aid us in what order we will be shooting in. In addition, the storyboard will help us in knowing which shots we need to film and the transition between shots in post production.