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.