Evaluation

Completed video

Magazine advert

After finishing my single artwork, I moved onto creating an advert which would be featured in a magazine advertising the single.
I wanted to keep the magazine advert related to the cover, but I also felt that it was a chance to link the original album to the new single. Therefore, I decided to stick with the urban look but with a feel similar to the original album artwork, in that certain colours and texts hold a slightly regal feel.
When looking for some inspirational pieces, I found myself trying different searches into Google to bring up some advert ideas. I found myself Googling 'music magazine poster', which is when I got my idea.
I wanted to keep the idea simple so that the message was put across swiftly, which is what adverts are generally meant to do. Therefore, I kept the poster fairly plain and simple, which also kept in line with the raw feel I went for with my single artwork. To do this, I used a rough brick wall as the backdrop, and roughed the paper edges using downloaded grunge brushes as an eraser. I also took time to choose my font carefully, so that it would be a relatively formal font which had been 'grunged' up. I created a faded look on the paper by turning the opacity down on most layers, so that everything layered into each other nicely. Below is the finished product.

Completed single artwork piece

I am pleased with the raw London look I have achieved with my single cover. The Skints are nothing but what they are, and don't pretend to be anything more. I feel this base feel has come through in my single artwork designs.

Single artwork back

After careful choosing and peer research, I decided to stick with my 3rd design of the single cover, which showed The Skints band name and single name on the London street sign post. Following this theme, I decided it would be an interesting idea to different kind of London street sign to incorporate the 3 track names for the single. Below is the original image I begun with.

The first thing to do was edit out the names. By using the clone stamp tool in Photoshop, this was nice and easy to do. I noticed the font was close to Times New Roman, so I colour picked the original text, and played with some blending options to make the text look realistic. Originally I expected to do the bevel option, but this didn't bring out the effect I had hoped, so I used a close drop shadow and changed the opacity of the text layers to blend into the background.

Next I decided I didn't like the building on the left, so I cloned that out. After finishing touches to make it look realistic, such as bar codes and copyrights, I finished with the image below. 

Single artwork designs

Below are three cover designs that I conjured up by using iconic features I had decided that I would attempt to incorporate previously.

Single artwork creation process - 2

As a completely different idea from the other, I decided to bring an edit to a real-world image which would draw upon urban roots. By starting off with a London street sign, by patching over the original text using the colour picker and then finding the correct font which matched the original text, I reinvented what was written on the street sign. The only difficult part of making this was adjusting the proportions of the text to make them fit in with the angle of the photography. However, as I feel I am adept in Photoshop, this did not take long to master.
This image includes the single title of "Born in East London", which is a lyric from the song 'Up Against The Wall'. This works both ways - 'Born in East London' is linked to the image by using the postcode E4, which anyone who knows much about London will know that it is the postcode for the general area. After a small amount of research, I narrowed down E postcodes to E4, which I believe is where The Skints' band members were raised. In a more literal sense, this sign is 'Up Against The Wall'. The black bars frame the sign, which focuses the concentration onto the band. The final image is below.

Single artwork creation process - 1

The creation process for this was one I had not anticipated to be as fiddly as it was. I had decided I wanted to show British ska by having the Union Jack flag linked with the two-tone idea of previous ska bands. Though it is not necessarily an image used by The Skints, it does connote many British ska bands such as The Specials & Madness. Below is the image I started with.

From here on I created a simple black-white two tone image, and layed this over the top, changing the blending options to overlay. Unfortunately, this did not give the original effect I had hoped. So, I decided from that to see if I could use the pieces of the two-tone image and jumble the flag up, as if it were a puzzle, but still keep the Union Jack recognisable. Once I had rearranged the flag sufficiently, I overlayed The Skints' iconic penny logo, featured on much of their artwork, onto the centre of the flag. Originally this blended in much more than I had hoped, so I filled the centre the centre with black to help show the penny details. With a few more contrast and brightness edits and the addition to bars and a stroke to the image, I ended up with the image below.

This, though my first image, was a piece I was rather pleased with. The jumbled two-tone idea leads to the idea of a new wave of British ska, which The Skints and affiliated bands such as Random Hand are bringing about. The penny in the middle shows it is not about the money, keeping it all to a minimum. This will relate to their audiences who know that their gigs and albums are always kept as low as possible in terms in pricing, but never quality. Generally, the cover has a very nice feel to it.

Single artwork thought process

The first things I needed to do in the process of creating my single cover was what it would feature. For each idea, I wanted to make sure I incorporated the band name, however not necessarily an single name. As for opening ideas, it is easier to keep the single name out of it, which allows me to keep more ideas included if it doesn't have to relate to the single name just yet.
I wanted to include items which would relate to The Skints location; East London, Britain. This included urban streets, the Union Jack, the London Underground sign, postcode features, street signs etc.
I also had to make a decision whether to have the single artwork as a political message, or simply a piece of eye-candy. The Skints' previous album cover for Live, Breathe, Build, Believe was somewhere in between in aesthetics. The cover had a slightly dark look, yet the message was simple and certain 'cartoony' features kept it balanced. The message is reteaching people how to live care-free. The cover is below.

I have always felt at home with Photoshop, and have been known to create music artwork as a pass time, so I am looking forward to engaging myself with an effective piece of single artwork.

Final effects over the music video

After finishing editing, the final part of the video needed was to use colour correction and various effects on the video. After viewing a few music videos, I came across a video which distinguished camera angles by different colour effects applied to them. The video, on one certain camera angle, applies a black and white effect. This, as a simple effect, seems to make quite a difference. We are planning to use this for one of the camera angles used throughout the gig footage of our video. I have embedded the video below.



Similarly, in this video, the audio at the end goes from the studio recorded music to the live performance with the crowd at the end. We took on board this interesting edit, and have used the same transition to the audience cheering from the studio music at the end in our music video.

Editing process

After a long and grueling series of complications, our editing of our music video is almost complete. As my concentration has been fully on the editing process, my blogging of editing has slowed down.

We ran into a number of problems, which we have eventually overcome, which include:

• File format - our video format was a file type which meant that Final Cut Express would make us have to render each piece of footage over and over every time any sort of change was made. For the first few weeks, we only got a very tiny amount edited due to having to re-render every time we made a change. Eventually we found a format we could convert all of our clips into so that we would not have to render. Though at first converting all the videos was time-consuming, after that we had a much easier time editing, with the ability to micro-manage timing.
• Space - our high-definition footage was very large in space, and our amount of clips we ended up with filled up the hard drive completely on our editing Mac. To tackle this, we originally started deleting the clips which we had simply put in a folder labelled 'Unusable'. After that, we realised much of our footage had duplicates, due to the unconverted footage still on the hard drive. Deleting every clip which we had already converted freed up almost 60 gigabytes of space, which conquered our problem.
• General filming problems - these include not all people being able to make filming dates, weather problems for continuity, filled space on the SD cards during filming days, location availability. 

Music video thus far - 31/3/11

Today we showcased our music video to the rest of our media group with a very rough cut. Uploaded above is the unfinished version, with, unfortunately, was exported at a low quality. The music is extremely 'boomy' for an unknown reason, which we did not have time to fix. However, it does give an idea of how the editing and shots are coming along.
The large black holes are where we have not inserted footage. Once we had all the gig footage, we cut the useful pieces and inserted them where they fitted. Therefore, the video has random pieces of the gig footage inserted. Also, due to our pre-production brainstorming, we had ideas of where we wanted certain shots to go, and thus we put those where we felt fit. We decided to edit this way rather than going through doing shot by shot and leaving no gaps, as then we knew how much we had to fill in and where. This also gave us an indication of how progressed the narrative was.

Update - 19/3/11

Today was our final filming date outside of school for the London narrative. We managed to get many more close-ups and extreme close-ups today, which we lacked in our last filming date. This will keep our music video interesting by varying shot types. We also captured a few more close-up establishing shots. This was perhaps our most successful London filming date, as we had the previous experience and knowledge of exactly what we wanted to obtain.

Update - 24/2/11

Today was used by narrative filming in London, mostly in Camden. We obtained many establishing shots, and some action shots, however watching back the footage much of the camera work was poor, and was not focusing in on the characters. Therefore, in the next media lesson we shall, as a group, go through the shots we have and filter through the good and bad, and see what is left for us that we need to film on a final filming date.

Update - 17/2/11

As referred to in a previous update, some items we shot were unsuitable due to the mise-en-scene not representing what we were envisaging. Today, Louise has filmed some establishing shots and herself and another character waking up, which will be put in the first section of the music video. As she has only filmed them today and contacted us using our media Facebook group, I have not yet seen the shots, however I am sure they will show what we want, and shall definitely go into the final video.

Update - 13/2/11

Today we filmed a section of the narrative where our rebellious group are waking up. We attempted to make each person look like they were waking up in a relatively disorganised area, which meant us setting up the scenery to have a teenage lifestyle mise-en-scene. Some sections, however, may need to be re-filmed in other locations, as we believe as a group that a few of the shots were too clean for what we were trying to portray. Other than that, the filming generally went well, and we also got shots where the individuals meet up and start their journey.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is the current era of film making, and as the name suggests, proceeds the modernist era, which ended after the two world wars. The two world wars made society start to question many grand narratives that had stood strong for so long; examples of these are religion, nationalism, governmental structures. The war and crisis that the world was thrown into after these two wars shook up art forms. The Wall St. Crash with the following depression throughout the 1930's, then the largest war the world had ever seen changed these. People questioned what they believed in - how could these narratives have brought about such chaos? Conveyed in art forms, postmodernism started as disjointed texts, signifying the now broken beliefs of the people.

Considering we're in the postmodern-era, it is almost impossible to make a non-postmodern music video, as anything created during this era can be interpreted that way. Music videos are a great example of postmodern ideals.

• Making the viewers aware of the filming and editorial process by attempting to break conventions of narrative filming. 
• Bricolage and pastiche are main features - known as the 'end of originality', postmodernism attempts to create new sub-genres by taking elements from contrasting genres and use them together.
• Being self-referential to make the viewer aware of the text, breaking conventions of the modern film making. This allows the director to play with various references and ideas, knowing that it won't matter if the narrative is broken, or the realism is removed.
• Allusions are used, referencing to another text. This connects the viewer with the piece in a different way, in that rather than being engaged in a narrative world, they realise the reference is being made, thus gives them a different view of the film from those who do not understand the reference. This is summed up by postmodern director Quentin Tarantino's quote, "I always hope that if one million people see my movie, they saw a million different movies". This point goes onto negotiated reading.
• Negotiated reading is where one text can have many different meanings, determined by the audience's backgrounds or various knowledge and viewpoints.

The most postmodern music artist to become famous recently is Lady Gaga. Her video for 'Telephone' uses most postmodern ideas, such as:

• Graphics onscreen, with the text allusions to Kill Bill
• Self-referential to her media life, "I told you she didn't have a d*ck'
• Her costume is bricolage of a pop-legend mixed with a prison yard uniform
• Product placement breaks realism, and is also an allusion to 80's film which were packed full of product placement
• Graphic cuts break realism and narrative
• The vehicle is an allusion to Kill Bill, which in itself is a postmodern film
• Reference to typical cookery shows
• Allusions to superheroes
• News genre included
• Graphic credits, not usually seen in a music video

Narrative filming

The group has now begun filming the narrative within school. We have decided to split the narrative into two for the storyline - the first section is a group of teenagers who truant from school to have a day in Camden, then to go to the Skints gig in the evening. The second section is another teenager who is a friend of those in the first, however chooses to stay in school and to have a regular day. However, his day gets worse and worse, and eventually the character becomes too frustrated and decides to bunk the rest of the day to join his mates in Camden.
So far, we have filmed two small sections of the second section, where the character's day is going badly within school. First, his school mate trips him as he is walking, and the second we have filmed is his teacher giving him a F for an essay. We are trying to keep the problems down to earth, so that the video is generally realistic and fits with the theme of the lyrics themselves, of an East London scene.
Choosing a school scene has been really useful, considering we can use a fully real scene for it, adding to the realistic mise-en-scene. We'll also be obtaining permission to film in other London areas for the other section of the narrative.

Update - 17/1/11

Whilst clearing my room today, I found a phone which could be used to smash in the video. We also started to organise a filming date as the 29th of January, however it appears some participants may be busy during this day, so we will have to reorganise.

Update - 10/1/11

Facebook discussions took place today for what we should include in the school narrative between myself and Louise. Ideas put forward were:

• Tripping up Bradley, who is having a bad day during the narrative
• Bradley breaking his phone
• Receiving a bad grade for an essay
• People throwing things at him