Video Final Cut

ALL-Final Digipak

Here is the final version of our Digipak. 

Inside Panels 
The inside consists of 2 panels which have a marble effect background in colour which contrasts to our front and back panels as they are in black and white. We took a picture of some flowers which we bought ourselves, from many different angles until we had the correct one, we then uploaded this image into Photoshop, I then edited it by cropping out the back ground, which left me with the flower only, I then used the eraser tool to feather out the rest of the flower I didn't want. I also decreased the opacity to around 70% to make it blend in more with the background. I then took a picture of Sophie And Charley the lead male and female from our narrative, wearing the same clothes as a scene from our narrative where they are going out for a date in a flashback, I then again cropped out parts I did not need and decreased the opacity to around 50% and placed them either side of the flowers in the middle of the panels. Finally we took pictures of the petals from the flowers, I enlarged the pictures on Photoshop, and placed one petal in each of the corners, of the panels which resulted in four petals, which meant we could then place the heads of the band members into the panels, again decreasing the opacity, and re-sizing and cropping the heads.

 Front Panel 
The front panel is an image of the band for the background on the bench in the location of Ilkley Moors, which was a location used in our music video, the pictures for the digipak were taken on shoot, when filming our performance footage. It is in black and white, as we wanted to try make it similar to our narrative being in black and white, also we wanted it to be different to the original N'SYNC digipak for ' gone '.

Back Panel 
The back panel is in the same location, however it is simply them looking towards the moors, rather than them looking at us. This is a clear link between the front and back panels, which is a typical convention of a digipak. We have included our own QR code which is a direct link to our production company blog, which is also a good feature, we have also put websites on for N'SYNC websites.

The Spine
Below is our spine for the digipak, we tried to make this simple, using the border effect we have used on our Digipak front and back panels, we have also used a confetti effect from Photoshop for the writing.

Final Magazine Advert

All-Mag Ad Draft 4

Evaluation 1- In what ways does your media product use, challenge or develop conventions of real media products?

Part1- Introduction and Format Conventions


Part 2- Genre Conventions


Part 3- Digipak

Part 3 from Melodie Abraham on Vimeo.


Part 4- Mag Ad

Untitled from Melodie Abraham on Vimeo.

Evaluation 2- How effective is the combination of your main media product and ancillary texts?

How effective is the combination of your main media product and ancillary texts? 

Our brief was to create a promotion package for the release of an album, including a music promo video, together with a cover for its release as part of an album digipak and a magazine advertisement for the digipak. As a group, we came up with our own production team,  'MELLIE PRODUCTIONS'. As a group we developed our ancillary packages and produced and directed our music video, to our song ' Gone' by 90's boy band N'SYNC.

It is important to note that in many cases not all digipaks and magazine adverts directly link to just one music video. This is because a digipak has many songs on it and therefore has to link to them all and the magazine advert is there to promote the digipak so also will not just tie into one specific video. 

Although this is slightly different for us as we have only created one video and used the shots taken separately for our digipak. Also some digipak/albums have more then one video for the same song an example of this would be U2. 

Another reason for why all 3 texts are more tightly linked would be that in real life example the artwork or shoots for the digipak and magazine advert would be out sourced to separate advertising companies.

An real company that is likely to produce our music video is Epik Music Videos who direct, edit and film  Music Videos, Behind The Scenes Documentaries and Event Filming. Epik Music Videos, mainly appeal to young, up and coming directors. Below is an example of a video made by Epik Music Videos.





Epik Music videos, say they are always looking for new talent to work with, the price of around £1,500 is expected to be paid to Epik Music Videos, in order for them to direct, edit and film the music video.  As with most production companies  
With most companies first you send them the track, and any ideas or storyboards you may have. After you have done this they will get in touch with you in some way to talk about locations and final budget.

You will then sit down with the company and arrange a budget, in which you will stick to when buying props and scouting locations, and when considering aspects of special effects. The budget is generally the most important aspect to consider when making a music video, it will help decide what your video can contain, normally the higher the budget the better quality your video will be.

After you have chosen your budget, you will then look around for locations to film scenes of your music video, a variety of locations are always useful and important way of making the audience more entertained rather than staring at the same location for the full 3-4 mins of the song.

Digipaks are a style of CD or DVD packaging, they are usually made out of cardboard or similar and one or more plastic trays for disks.


A real company that would produce our digipak would be a company such as 'WeWOW'. They specialise in CD and DVD replication and duplication. The specialise in eco-friendly packaging also which means our digipak would be made with eco-friendly components such as vegetable inks. The invented the wowPak. A unique CD presentation pack produced from a single piece of FSC accredited board. 'WeWow' also help you to sell your product as they have close connections with companies such as Amazon.

Again, like with the production of the music video, the group will go to the company with a general idea for the digipak and a budget, allowing the company to produce something ideal for the groups video.


Magazine adverts are very useful tool as a huge number of the population read magazines. Also there are many different types of magazine that appeal to very specific audiences so you can try to sell to your target audience. A company such as Maa Designs, could possibly design the Magazine Advertisement. Maa design in many forms including Brochures, Advertising, Posters and many more. Their designs can include 2D and 3D images placed on them. They have a fixed fee of £195 and promise the total project of 5 days. 


This just shows how the 3 texts would not be linked if this was a professional project.
But saying this usually the group would send each company a small overview of what they want with ideas. This would benefit the artist to create a brand that is easily recognisable with the public. A recurring theme is a good idea.


Applying idea to our texts


In our own work we used a recurring location in all 3 texts we used the moors which is a rural setting and we also wanted to tie it in with the gene conventions. We used a very similar in the mag and back panel and the digipak, this was so people knew immediately that it was Nsync.

Front Digipa

Back Digipak

As you can see the products tie together very well. Due to the similar shots and the clothing worn by our 'young boy band' and actual boy band. We also used flowers on the inside of our digipak and we used a bouquet in our narrative as another tie together.

The clothes worn by the boy band are the same in each aspect, filming and pictures. This was because we took the images for digipack on location of shooting, but it does tie in very well together.

For the inside panels of our digipak as well as having Sophie and Charlie layered in we have placed the boy bands heads, one in each petal which were placed in each corner. This clearly links are two narrative leads with the band, and also with the music video, which you can see above to the right.

Some of the aspects we deliberately made different;

The digipak is black and white on the outside panels- this was done as some parts of the video  are black and white and black and white albums is a very common convention in boy band especially slow songs.

Our teaser was also created in black and white because it would stand out in a magazine against the other coloured pages also so that it tied with the digipak and when we released the actual mag ad it would be different.

The mag ad and digipak location are different, the mag ad is at a memorial, this links in with the idea or the video (the lead girl being dead at the end) it also signifies to the audience that idea of the video featured in the digipak.  

Evaluation 3- What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?


N'SYNC were a major Boy band in the late 90's, when they released their first album, which was self-titled ' N'SYNC' in 1997, they became one of the most popular Boy bands of the teen pop and R&B genre. This meant that by the time they released their second album in 2000, their fan base had increased, with the majority being females ranging from the ages of 12 - 25. So based on this we we deicded the primary audience would most probably been between the age range of 12 - 24, and the secondary audience being between the ages of 24 - 44 , as they would have been the target audience, also we decided that there could be a tween age 8-12, because many current boy bands have the audience and possibly a homosexual audience because the boy band are attractive. When trying to cater to so many audiences it does make it difficult what you can and cant included for example we started of having the boy drinking from a whiskey bottle but after audience feedback we were told it could alienate the younger audience so we removed it.


We then we had to test our hypothesis by showing the pictures to people inside the target audience. We showed two boys and two girls from the ages of 15-18 images of boy bands from the 90s (the same era as nsync) and asked them if they could name their songs.


Boy band pictures for AF

From this we found that woman are predominantly the audience for boy bands. This confirmed our ideas about our audiences.

Music Video

We used various ways of gaining audience feedback, this included, Facebook, Backstreet Boys fan pages, YouTube, class screenings, screenings to other media students, screenings to members of our year group.

Every time we filmed we got audience feedback so that we could improve every time.

Firstly we tested our idea by filming a sample scene which was around 1 minute long.

The feedback from this was very important. We changed a big part of our idea by having a separate boy and girl for the narrative, the group we showed it to said that it may confuse the audience but it would also provide more shot variation. We were also told them some of our shots were too long. Seeing as we were told this by people inside our target audience we thought it would be vital for us to change this.

We then went on to film our first full rough.

From this we were told to make quite big changes for example;

Feedback From Rough Cut 1

Also due to the fact that people said the members in the boy band could do with changing to make it look more realistic we had a change of actors. So then went on to film more footage and do a 2nd rough cut.

After this we were told a few minor things to change for example to add in more pictures of the girlfriend as it was possible the people may achieve an oppositional reading (Stuart Halls theory of readings) of a homosexual relationship between the boy band and the male. So we added more shots we had from filming. Many people said they really like the effect I put on some shots to signify they are flashbacks called vignette. Again we were told that we needed to cut down to length of our first shots as they were too long. We publish all of these on You tube s that we can get Audience feedback. We got one comment which said maybe we should dull the colour of some of the shots. So we tired this but some of our class mates thought it looked better with the effect of because it was interesting to look at. So we decided to keep it.

We then produced a 3rd rought cut

From this we got very good feedback and we just added a few more shots of the girlfriend and made the ending fade last longer so it lingered. 

Overall the feedback were getting from our different audiences. 

• The main positives we got was that the shot variety was very good. It kept the audience interested.
• The effects we used made the project look very professional.
• Some of the shots very specifically liked by people one example is the one where one member of the boy band is layered into a flashback and he looks in their direction.

Digipak

We took images for our digipak whilst on location filming. Here is the 1st draft of digipak back and front.

From this we were told that he text needed to be smaller because it covers the whole image nearly. Also there is no small print in this which needs to be put in. 

We were also told that the font could be changed as it looks a little 'old fashioned'.

This is the front panel. From this we were told that it was slightly plain and that the informaition on the sticker should be changed. And the dvd logo needs to be bigger. It turned out we had to change our cast so we would be taking new pictures when we re-filmed.

When we created our second draft. With this one we tried a few different effects:

We were told that this one wasn't right. It just made the image look blurry and pixelated. So we tried a different effect.

This one was rejected by our audience because it didn't fit with the boy band genre. It looked as if it was some more fitting for a pop or indie digipak. 

One positive we got was that people really liked the connection between the front and the back So we decided to keep that aspect.

This is our final digipak was the above. It contained many of the format conventions of a digipak.

These were the initial drafts of the inside but overall we got told that these were not very good and they needed improving. As the didn't look very well done and our target audience didn't like it very much. They said they objects that we layered into the shot look 'tacky'.

After getting an idea from a fellow student we made a second draft of the inside our target audience said it was much better and we decided to keep it as our final edit.

We think it would standout as the outside is black and white.

Magazine Ad

To begin with our mag ad had no real I.T manipulation which was bringing our marks down by a lot compared to the quality of our music video. When making our first draft it was a basic rough draft just trying to get to grips with an idea, and seeing what the band looked like, so we clearly knew before we even showed it to the class for audience feedback we had a lot of improvements to make.

We were told that we needed to show some image manipulation, multi-layering for example. Also we were told to show font and size variation, as well as adding some social networking logos etc.

This teaser is what we created to place into magazines before the actual mag ad. It common for artist to release many different versions advertising the same album. 

The feedback from this told us that we needed to make the band name be the most prominent. and some of text colours needed to be changed.

This is our 2nd draft. It shows our new idea of having a younger group of fashionable boys looking/ admiring at older boy band, then showing boy band behind. We didn't end up placing the boy band behind because we were not able to re-shoot with the band, so we layer the faces into the frame. We also used the lines created by the bench to write our text.

This is the final magazine advert. I changed the font to the band name to make it stand out more and made the text stand out more. 

If we had more experience with final cut we would try to make the magazine advert include more image manipulation.

We did receive more feedback on the video than the ancillary texts, due to people not really giving us that much helpful feedback. Overall audience feedback is essential for making a positive product. Every time we made a new rough cut and got audience feedback we were getting closer to creating a perfect product. Feedback doesn't always help, if your trying to appeal to multiple audiences and when you show them your work the different groups come up with different suggestions it makes it hard to find a balance. 

Evaluation 4- How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research and planning and evaluation stages?

Question 4- How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research and planning and evaluation stages? on Prezi

Rough Cut 4

Rough Cut 3

ALL- Magazine Ad 3

This is our 3rd magazine advert draft. This is using pictures we took immediately after we filmed our footage. This is using the new cast members. We have included the 

• Band name- in white so it stands out.
• Images of social networking sites- twitter and images brands that would retail the album.
• Name of nsync official site
• Date of release

ALL- Feedback from Rough cut 2

From this rough cut we have been told to take out a shot of the whiskey as it may narrow our target audience. Tween is a big part or our Target Audience and having alcohol in the video would alienate them.

Also there are some shakey shots that we need to look at and see if we can change them.

All- Inside Digipak

Here are the first ideas for the inside panels of the digipak. We plan to get feedback on these and then improve on images.

ALL- Rough cut 2

This is our second rough cut. In this one wee have changed the performance footage over to the new boy band line up.

ALL- Roughcut

Magazine Ad Draft 2

Eval 4

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

During the research and planning i used different internet based sites such as blogger and scribd. Blogger is the site we have used to present this years and last years coursework. There are many different tools available to use on blogger. I have used ones such as 

• Links lists
• Hyperlinks
• Polls
• RSS Feeds
• MP3s and Podcasts embedded

Things like the poll allowed me get some basic audience feedback when choosing the song

(show screengrabs on how to make gadgets)

Photoshop was used when creating our digipak and magazine adverts. It is used to change and add features such as text.

(Show uneditied picture then change to edited and say how this was done)

Do the same for magazine advert

Final Cut

Final cut express is a non-linear video editing application created by Apple Inc. It is designed for advanced editing of digital video as well as high-definition video, which is used by many amateur and professional videographers. Last year we used imovie to construct our videos and final cut gave us the ability to do more things. 

(Add picture of final cut screen)

I used final cut to edit my video. Also to split clips, and effects such as desaturate- which is changing it to black and white or vignette (shot of vignette being used) which we used.

In the evaluation stage I used all of the tools I previously used to the research and planning and construction stage. 

Eval 3

What have you learnt from audience feedback?


N'sync were an American boy band who were formed in Orlando, Florida in 1995. The group consisted of 5 male members  JC Chasez,Justin Timberlake, Lance Bass, Joey Fatone, & Chris Kirkpatrick. They split in 2002. At this time they had fans ranging from 10-30 but their primary target audience is 15-24 females. Currently the age of the band members range from 31-40. A secondary audience would be people ranging from 25-34 as they would ave been that primary target audience at the time of the song. Another secondary audience could be a gay male audience as they boy band is relatively attractive so appeal to a male audience.


We gathered our feedback in numerous ways;

1. Interviewing our class after watching the video- this was very helpful as unlike when we got feedback from other students the media students could give us feedback that they knew would be achievable as we are all working with he same equipment and have the same budget.
2. Feedback from our media teacher- this we found the most helpful as he knew has a deep knowledge of music videos and what looks good and able to give us really detailed feedback rather than 'it was good'
3. Posting on youtube and getting comments- this was good as we could get people not exclusively from Ilkley Grammar to give their views.
4. We also used sites such as facebook for feedback on our digipak pictures. 

For our magazine advert we simply asked people and wrote down their feedback. 

MA- Draft Evaluation 2

How effective is the combination of your main media product and ancillary texts? 


Our brief was to create a promotion package for the release of an album, including a music promo video, together with a cover for its release as part of an album digipak and a magazine advertisement for the digipak.
It is important to note that in many cases not all digipaks and magazine adverts directly link to just one music video. This is because a digipak has many songs on it and therefore has to link to them all and the magazine advert is there to promote the digipak so also will not just tie into one specific video. 
Although this is slightly different for us as we have only created one video and used the shots taken separately for our digipak. Also some digipak/albums have more then one video for the same song an example of this would be U2. 
Another reason for why all 3 texts are more tightly linked would be that in real life example the artwork or shoots for the digipak and magazine advert would be out sourced to separate advertising companies.


A real example of a company that would produce our music video would be.                                                                                                   


In our own work we have some aspects that tie them together;

• The locations used in the mag and digipak are the same as the video
• Titles of Digipak and Mag Ad link together - "New Generation" 
• Same front in mag ad and digipak
• Layering is used in digipak and video
• Boy band present in all 3 texts
• The boyband wearing the same clothes in all 3 texts

Differences

• Digipak is in black and white, where as the mag ad will be in colour 
• The narrative is not included in the mag ad
• Style of the font used for digipak and mag ad are not the same 
• Black font colour on the Digipak and White on the mad ad
• some of the locations are different 

MA- Draft Evaluation1- In what ways does your media product use, challenge or develop forms and conventions of real media products?

Video
Goodwin said that there are 3 main types of music video;
Narrative- where the lyric of the song directly relate to what we see on screen
Performance- where the artist or band are performing in the video, although it doesn't always have to be the actual artist it could be actors, an example of this is Nickleback-Rockstar 
Concept- where the video doesn't relate to the lyrics


There are several common conventions in music videos;

• Main focus is the artist or band
• There is fast paced editing
• Part of the video is cut to the beat of the track
• Contains one of the three types of music video, having more than one type is very common
• Lip-syncing used in part or all of video
• Shot variation
• Variety of locations
• Linear concept
• Non- linear concept
• Layering
• Special effects
• Titles
• Props
• Diagetic intro
• Bright/ artificial lighting
• Heterosexual relationship portrayed as normative
• Sexual theme
• Male and/or Female gaze
• Dancing/ Choreography
• Costumes
• Glamour

Genre specific conventions pop/boyband;

• Lead member is focused on
• Clothing that is modern/ on trend * say how old clothing 1990s has changed from new boyband 2012. (more trendy
• Clothing of each member that all ties in together
• Choreography ranging from simple to complex
• Locations used usually a mix of studio and outside locations such as cliff tops, rivers, parks.
• Black and white shots combined with colour to create effects or show a change in time eg past and present
• The use of a female as a love interest
• Expensive cars
• Having texts in the shots- this could be the lyrics as they are being sung. eg Rhianna-You da one
• Water is often used to give a soft feel to the videos, and to appeal to females

The conventions we used in our video

• In our video we used the conventions of lip-syncing. We have lip-syncing in nearly all of our performance shots. 
• We also used props in our video, we used a bouquet a pink flowers, a bottle of whiskey and an Iphone to name a few. 
• We used a heterosexual relationship in our video between the boy and girl in the narrative side of our video. We showed the relationship by having them with their arms around each other and trying to signify that they lived together. 
• We also used a combination of black and white shots and colour shots to signify a difference in time, for the flashbacks we used an effect called vignette where the outer edge of the frame is blurred and we took the blurred colour to black and white to the the only colour was focused right on the centre of the frame were the couple is.
•  We also took the convention of modern clothing, we asked the boys to wear relatively plain clothing, mostly dark colours such as grey and brown. we took our clothing ideas from current bands eg jls, one direction.
• Shot variation, we used the Ilkley Moor, the River Wharfe, a house, the cemetery, the park
• We used layering and special effect in our video. 
• We have one singer playing the lead.
• We included a small diagetic introduction- a shot of Charlie look at a picture of Sophie on his Iphone.

Some of the conventions we couldn't use such as high key lighting as we don't have access to that type of equipment. Also the use of expensive cars as our budget was practically non existent.
Other conventions we challenged was fast paced editing, we have keep our editing slower than some because we want it to reflect the mood of the song, the song itself is slow and about a broken relationship. We also did not use any choreography because we didn't feel it would fit with the song. We didn't place any text in the video as we felt it may cheapen to look of our product.


Digipak
Digipaks are a paperboard case that allows space for a CD (in a plastic tray) and an information booklet about the artist or the tracks.They are used because a number of images and text can be printed onto every panel which is perfect for a special edition CD or DVD.  A digipak is a recyclable form a cd packaging. Digipaks are not as common as jewel case. A digipak consists of;

• Front panel
• Back panel
• 2 inner panels
• spine

Common conventions of Digipak

The front cover of the digipaks can contain;

• Artist shot
• Name and Album name
• Sticker showing DVD bonus
• Sticker showing leading singles contained- these are used to get the audiences attention and highlight what is on the digipak.

Back Cover;

• Track listings and timings
• Bar code
• QR Code
• Website URL
• Logos eg production and record company

The advantages of a Digipak;

• Recyclable as its made from card
• Lower in weight so reduces distribution
• Thinner cases- can fit more on the shelve
• Some resemblance to a LP
• More collectible than a jewel case

Other features;

• Spine- small details such as catalogue number this can either be a different colour or image to other panels or the picture front the front or back can be continued over the spine
• Inside design
• Removable lyrics sheet
• Distinct colour scheme

Some existing digipaks are very simple for example Take That- Beautiful World whereas others are a lot more complex.

The example we used in our digipak;

• Including a image of the band and making in the focal point of the front.
• Have the relationship bewteen the front and back cover- we used the same pose for the boys but took it front the back.
• Sticker
• Logos
• Social Networking images
• Track listing and times
• Production company URL
• Relationship between front and back panel.

Magazine Ad

Our target audience is 15-24 females, a secondary audience is an older audience of 25-35 because the they would of been 15-245 when the NSYNC track was released. Another secondary audience could be gay males of the same age.

It is possible for us to use slightly different adverts to appeal to a slightly different audience for example for a younger audience who read magazines such as 'Sugar' we could use larger texts and have more focus on cute and happy pictures of the boy band whereas for a older female or gay male audience who would read 'more' or 'heat' we could use slightly more seductive pictures of our boy band.

Conventions used in our Mag Ad.

• Artist name
• Album name
• Release date
• Production company url
• Image of band
• Small amount of text
• Font variation