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.