Advanced Portfolio A2

Thursday, 20 January 2011

Tuesday, 18 January 2011

For the evaluation: Trashed first ideas...

FIRST IDEAS...

The green screen ditched this idea...

Would've been used, but the snow, and inclusion of green screen made us bin it...

Shot was a bit poor, didn't sell the artist as much as green screen effects...

Wasn't snowing.

We wanted to include the band in battle but we didn't like it...

...Same here.

Good shot, but no snow and also, note the dude in shot behind the tree...

Wasn't realistic.

Ended up using a different version.

FIRST DAY SHOT IDEAS
Which then needed recreating...

EFFECTS...

FINAL EFFECTS: How we ditched the band on set for green screen effects...

And how we met the genre of 'Psychadelic' with its imagery...

Plus how we used green virtually everywhere to create trippy scenarios...

Thursday, 13 January 2011

Final copy of digipack

Block B ADVANCED PORTFOLIO CRITICAL EVALUATION

James Bowler, Jon Watson, Kieran Booker

1) The Genre of the band we used, MGMT, is psychedelic pop. This genre is very surrealist in style. We have used very strong elements of the psychedelic style, such as bright colours and mesmerising patterns. This is most prominent in the performance part of the music video. We also explored some surrealist conventions such as floating heads, evil clowns, cardboard tubing, superman and the Swedish flag. These all compliment the way that MGMT display themselves in their music videos. Our music video has conventional short shots as well as some long slow motion shots to fit with the pace of the song. We have made certain actions in the video reflect the music as its happening. We’ve been greatly influenced by the style of the band, and our strange narrative reflects their style. The use of fancy dress style costumes emphasises MGMT’s quirky style an flamboyant costume, the more homemade style of some of the costumes added to how effective the video turned out to be. At the end the band walks off screen and the green screen is shown, this displays an element of postmodernism. This challenges the existing conventions of music videos as the production is revealed. We also didn’t want to use the conventional band in front of a green screen, so we used green t-shirts to give the band members floating head and arm appearances. Challenging these conventions allowed us to focus on performance in a different manor than we had originally intended.

2) We have maintained a clear image and theme for MGMT in our range of products throughout our campaign by emphasising on the bright colours and hippy styles that the band has previously put across in all of their work. We did this through looking over everything we could find by MGMT as well as other artists related to them, their genre of music and their styles of fashion ect and then we tried to come up with ideas that would relate to these. We intended to interrelate our website, cd cover and video for the music production project by using common themes and making it obvious to people looking that these was all from the same band, to do this we first decided that we needed something that could be shown on all our pieces but not seem out of place in the general theme of things, we decided on creating a cartoon logo which we used for our central piece on our website and as the cover of our album. The cartoon seems relevant as it looks psychedelic just like MGMT’s other album covers as well as sticking to the themes of imaginative dressing up and costumes from the video. Their overall purpose is to make the products all seem like they are related to each other and to put across to the viewers that these are all products from the same band. I believe that we successfully used a range of ancillary texts to put across our product.

3) We learned a lot from our audience feedback after showing them the video. We gained a lot of praise, especially for the green screen effects and lip syncing accuracy. At the time of the showing also, we were praised for the mix of both narrative and performance seamlessly working together as one. Our feedback was to just tighten up each clip and transition to smooth certain clips together. We aimed to meet these points and during editing we gave most clips transitions to smooth them together, although not too many as it would be overdone. The green screen clips had different effects on them but all similar, with effects such as zoom blurs and false colours to match the video to its psychedelic genre (with the rainbow colours and blurred effects). Also some other feedback given was that the battle scenes needed to be zoomed in as they were too far out. This seemed a problem at first because we had hardly any time to reshoot, but then we realised on iMovie we could use a smooth zoom function, which would have the same effect as shooting it again with zoom. We agreed with all of the audience feedback, as it helped us eventually ‘sell’ our artist, with more effects and a smoother outcome. We felt it really enlightened us as we had majority of the class praise our video but was also given constructive feedback which helped our video become entirely complete.

4) We used an iMac with iMovie, Adobe Photoshop and iWeb to construct our creative work, accompanied with a blogger.com account to ‘blog’ and diarise our progress during the work itself. On the blog, our planning folder had to be scanned and noted on to show your progress at first, and eventually, during the editing and image work, we kept posting multiple drafts of our work until the final copies themselves, which would then be posted and evaluated upon. This showed our progress constructively I feel. We used the Internet video sharing website Youtube to gather influences, such as music videos themselves and what effects they use. It was in fact Youtube that helped us garner ideas for the green screen effect, as we watched a video called ‘Photoshop Handsome’ by Everything Everything, which shows the actual effects we wanted. Influences aside, the blog itself made us drive our creativity more. After making the blog design match that of the ‘Psychedelic genre’ we wanted to post every piece of work we did and every thought onto the blog so that we could have an in depth look back at our progress from the start if we wanted to. Using the blog, and social networking website Facebook, we were able to distribute our music video to a wider audience. Youtube also was used to distribute our video, as we wanted a bigger audience(the world) to possibly see our video and post what they think, to give more connectivity and gain a little bit of praise in the process.

ABSOLUTE FINAL WEBSITE

CHANGED TREES TO THE BAND

Tuesday, 11 January 2011

C'EST FINALE! The final music video is HERE

ET VOILA!

Here is the low quality (if not blurry) music video! Its taken 3 months and a lot of blood, sweat and tears!!!

Friday, 7 January 2011

WEBSIIIIITE MADE ON IWEB :)

we experimented with some framing for the text on the site's homepage

We wanted it to look colourful, vibrant and interesting

The final product of this work is a combination of different colours and line styles
snazzy eh?

Digipak Interior

This is the final design of the Digipak Interior.
The idea is to represent the difference between the good and evil teams :)

Tuesday, 21 December 2010

Green Screen Demo Video (and Raw FX Footage)

Here is the video of our Green Screen edit, filmed Tuesday 14th December (Last Week). Basically just a run through of all of the raw effects, green screen and video FX we wanted to try out. In the end here is the compilation video of our little mess around. Plus, on another note, the actual music video for 'Weekend Wars' is NEARLY HERE! Enjoy! :)

We thought that the shoot was enlightening, as when it came to the actual video when we edited our green screen footage, we found out how to actually make it effective. Our mistakes were to obviously, keep the camera still, and have a motive next time! Please leave us a comment on how effective you thought this shoot looked! Many thanks....

Monday, 20 December 2010

IMovie HD still images...

After the Green Screen shoot last Friday, all morning was spent monday editing the video. Here below are some of the final edited green screen shots, which are looking fabulous so far. The video is around about 98% done too! HOORAHH! YEY! Check em out.....

Black and white and green.

HOW DO THEY DO THAT? :O

God.

Funky hypnotic effects are due when Kieran plays the keys...

Spiral Jay.

'Luke, I am your father...'

Eddie, after his vocals in the ending shot, walks away from the camera as the effects fade.

Pictures from Green Screen shoot...

After much deliberation, our group finally decided on use of the green screen. We did a demo on Tuesday involving me (Jay) and Kieran with guitars, aiming to in the lesson actually film on the screen. Now we've finally got the hang of it. At first we had difficulty with the edits because the Mac was having an off-day, but friday, the green screen shoot went ahead. Pictures are below :)