For my digi-pack research and CD cover, I have decided to analysis two vary contrasting album covers, both of a pop genre, one is more stereotypically pop where as the other is classed more as indie pop. The covers I will be analysing are "the Kooks - Sway" and "Britney Spears - Circus" as both are very different and I think by doing this analysis, it will help m,e a great deal when it comes to designing my own cover.
I was on the main blog the other day having a browse at every body's blogs and seeing if there was anything from any lesson I had missed and I came across Oyinda's blog. I saw that she had recently uploaded an example of an A2 music video that had been awarded a grade 'A'. I remember a while ago when my group had finished and edited our as film project to perfection so we had a bit of spare time left over at the end and just for fun, we were looking at what music videos had been made on other media courses across the country. Funnily enough, this video that Oyinda has put on her blog, is a favourite that I liked watching back then.
I feel that this music video is relevant to our in the fact that many of our shots are edited in to black and white and adjusted with the contrast and saturation controls. Most of this video id edited to black and white, apart from the odd shot where certain bits of colour are depicted. I think we will hopefully be able to achieve this small amount of colour from the editing technique on final cut pro called "colour pass".
Also, on this video they have also used the Polaroid pictures effect where they begin to move inside from what started as a still image. I believe that this girl achieved this by using the "green screen" affect on final cut pro, so hopefully we can get ours looking as good as this groups does!
After watching the tutorial on basic editing techniques and how to use it, we were looking more into detail about what effects can be achieved. The main technique we would like to achieve is the "Green Screen" effect through a Polaroid picture to make it go from a still image to a moving one.
On this following video, it didn't have green screen, but it had many other techniques that we thought looked excellent and that we'd like to try out as group on our music video. My personal favourites were "through a brick wall" "gazing out of a window" and "time travel", but all of them looked excellent,however we will only need to use some of them as if the music video h as to many transitions and special effects, it will begin to look more and more like a film rather then a music video!
Now that in our media room our school has provided us with brand new Imac's, we are finally able to have access to the programme of final cut pro. final cut pro is a much more advanced programme then Imovie and a lot of better effects and techniques can be used and achieved in order to produce a better final product (in our case, a music video).
We were then told that out of the 6 brand new Imac's my groups' was the only one to have final cut pro on! we were delighted to hear this as we could get going on it straight away where as the other groups will have to wait a little longer until it is working on their new Imacs.
In order to help us understand how final cut pro works and how to use it etc, we watched the following tutorial video on YouTube to give us the basics and great hints and tips in making our music video look the best it possibly can!
Narrative theory and structure
NARRATIVE is the term given to coherence and organisation to a series of given facts. The human mind needs a natural sense of narrative in order to connect events together and make certain interpretations based on these connections. In every situation, our mind always seeks a beginning, middle and an end and by understanding this shows that we understand how a common narrative is structured and shown to us.
Narrative Conventions
NARRATIVES are always made up of several similar conventions in order to find it's correct meaning. Within this meaning there are a series of codes that need to be considered. When we look at a narrative we examine its: GENRE, CHARACTER, FORM and TIME.
Narrative Structures
There are many ways in breaking down and defining what a narrative structure is. For example, you may here a Hollywood film describe as "a classic Hollywood narrative" meaning it has three acts. News stories have their own individual structure. A lot of work has been completed by literacy theorists in to develop ways of deconstructing a narrative:
- Tvzetan Todorov suggests that narrative is simply equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium,
- Vladimir Propp suggests hat narratives strongly depend on characters and action
- Claude Levi-Strausse believes that there is a constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only ever end on a resolution of conflict. Opposites can be visual (light/darkness/movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate/control/panic) and do with the sound track. Also, he believes that binary oppositions can also be used in order to deconstruct the narrative of something.
For my summer exam, we have tow rite about a narrative piece either focused on AS or A2. Both the film we produced last year and the music video which is still undergoing it's editing process, have clear narratives. However, for the exam I think I will write about my A2 music video. This is because our short opening to a horror film last year was told in linear form and was shown in chronological order and the music video is much more complex when it comes to it's narrative. The music video includes flashbacks and flash forwards which fit in with the narrative and has a broader 'plot' and so I will have more to talk about when it comes to analysing the narrative in the exam.
Narrative on film
the basic narrative to our horror film was a victimized ballet dancer who was being followed and stalked by a villain all dressed in black. It was called "The music box" because of the fact she had a similar outfit to the ballet dancer that spun inside the box shown numerous times in the film opening and also because when the villain had possession of the box, he has possession of her as well. The villain eventually ends up following her home from dance class one day and the opening ends in a fantastic cliff hanger and the audience are left in suspense as to whether he kidnaps the girl or not.
Narrative on music video
A teenage girl has split up with her boyfriend and throughout the song, in between the performance clips (where she is just singing to the camera), she is reminiscing on all the good memories she had with her boyfriend before the relationship ended. There are many flashbacks of the happy times and therefore this reflects the overall narrative as a whole.
Overall, I feel i have exceeded my knowledge on narrative far More then what I knew at AS level and that when it comes down to writing about narrative for the exam this summer, I feel confident that I have the correct terminology and background information on to talk about the narrative of either my year 12 or 13 produced piece with in media.
Although I have already spoken about our outing to IKEA and what we filmed as a group, but it took me a while to find the clip that we used for our research and what gave us the inspiration to film some of material for our music video at IKEA in the first place. It's taken from a clip from the comedy/romance film "500 days of summer" where the couple are running around IKEA pretending it's their house that they have moved into together as a couple etc. We thought this had a really good effect on showing how realistic the couple looked. So, as Elle and Alex are Boyfriend and Girlfriend in real life, it wasn't hard for them to act like the 2 characters did in the film!
(video to be uplaoded)
I was watching TV last night when i saw this advert for "Saga Cruises". I looked like a normal advert but then as I watched closer, it had one of the same concepts that myself and my group wanted to achieve in our music video.
the way in which the photo's move around the space is how we want our stop motion arrow and "L" "O" "V" "E" letters to look like once edited to perfection. Also, the way in which the Polaroid photos have been green screened and the images inside the photo go from "still" to "real life" and this exactly what we want to happen in our music video.
Now that I had done some research into existing CD covers of my pop genre (see 9th January post) I need to define what a CD digi-pack actually is and how it is different from a normal CD cover.
ng a front and back cover, it "folds out" into different panels which have different functions. Most commonly it is either 4, 6 or 8 panels.Throughout all 4 days of filming, we decided that we need to include intertexuality and stop motion of some sort to up our grade to the highest we can. We came up with to ideas of a stop motion video of both an animation of a heart and its arrow and with the heart eventually breaking. We had 6 images of the same thing, but in each image, the arrow moved slightly further across the paper until it eventually reached the other side and has broken in half. This is iconography for our song as the title is "Broken Arrow" and so by having a narrative and performance plot of Elle and Alex breaking up, we wanted an actual animation of the title of the song.
Whilst on Youtube searching for the "airplanes" video for my intertexuality research, I came across this video by chance. I love the way in which u can see the sky and clouds moving. We could possibly film something similar to this to show how over a period of time, that Elle and Alex's relationship was beginning to show "cracks" over time.
I thought we could show this with Elle being presented with a bunch of red roses from Alex when the relationship is going well and then setting the camera up and filming then for say half an hour a day until they are eventually dead and then when editing it, speed it up so it looks like they die out fast, like their relationship. However, we already have over an hour's worth of footage which we need to cut down to just the 3 and a half minutes to the length of our song. But who knows, if we get time, it may be worth the time.
It's the final day of filming and time for our final location, Alexandra Palace for it's beautiful views and scenery of London such as Canary Wharf and the Gherkin buildings. We arrived at around 4pm and it was rather dusky and so we began filmign striaght away. We brought a big tourch with us so that when it did get dark, we shine this upon Elle's face and create a "spot light" effect.
This image was once I took on my phone and uploaded to my laptop. as you can see, the lights on the scenery look very picturesque! We wanted to get going straight away and so we set up the tripod to begin filming some scenery shots with Elle standing in front, but slightly to the side of the shot to remember the importance of rule of thirds when filming. just as we were setting up, a security guard came out and asked if we had permission to film. We explained that we were media A2 students at a local school and were filming the horizon for out music video. However, much to our surprise, the problem got sorted within 5 minutes as all we had to do was sign a form with a prove of student I.d.
So, after that little mis-hap, we began filming. we included several different panning shots of the scenery with Elle in front with the torch to make sure her face was lit up. After this we set it up along a walkway and had her singing and walking towards us. Seeing as it was 5 o clock at night and was dark we had a big light that was quite bright and shone it on her. This looked a bit weird in some shots as you could see a big circle where the light was but in other shots, such as when Elle was standing by an arch way singing, it looked good.
After all shots at Alexandra Palace were complete, we went back to Elle's house to do the filming of the photograph's as part of "Elle's memories" of the good times her and Alex had together before they split up. As a group we made the photos by cutting out pictures of them and sticking them on card backgrounds to make them look like the typical Polaroid picture. We also did some green screen's of this to see if it will work on iMovie. This inspiration and use of intertextuality has come from the music video "Airplanes - BoB" when the camera pans across all the Polaroid pictures and then one of them starts moving. We would like to try and incorporate this into our music video, but if it doesn't work, as we weren't too sure, we filmed it with the park bench shot as well so we can zoom into it and the next scene will happen.
The way in which the photos's move in this video is what we woul dlike to achieve as a group when and if the green screen tool works on imovie.
With the weather looking appealingly bright, we decided to film the footage of Elle and Alex in our local park in which they meet on a park bench and realise they are reading the same novel. We walked around the park in order to find a correct bench for how we wanted our material to look. After 20 minutes of walking through muddy grass and leaves, we found a bench at the far end of the park where not many people were walking past and we thought this was perfect. 
Finally, as we thought we had achieved all the shots we needed, we then filmed some "muck around" shots of Elle and Alex together in their good times, just in case we didn't already have enough from IKEA on day 2 of filming. We also remembered that we wanted some shots of the pair of them to make it look like it was a "home video" effect. So, we achieved this by Elle getting on Alex's back and Elle pointing the camera at them laughing, joking, running around and just having fun as a couple.
With all the studio clips out the way, we now were well on our way to producing our music video. Our second chosen location is the famous home ware shop "IKEA" in which we wanted to use for clips of Elle with her boyfriend Alex to see them having a good time, but also we would use this material for flashbacks on their bad times as well.Based on our background research from the film "500 days of summer", the clips of the main male and female characters running around and looking at the kitchens, bathrooms and bedroom etc, this is what we wanted to achieve, but by making the shots more original and unique.
Furthermore, we filmed several clips of Elle and Alex running around, holding hands, sitting in the kitchens pretending to have meals, jumping on beds, sitting on different types of sofa's/chairs etc and just making it look like her and her boyfriend are having a lot of fun together. Once all the 'happy' shots had been completed, we then had to film the 'bad times' of Elle and Alex and so we filmed pan shots of Elle almost "pulling" Alex along and it looked as if he wasn't interested in what was going on at all and that he just wanted to be at home.
From the footage we filmed on day 1 of filming, we made a montage of clips from both of our camera's. Some of the shots we won't use at all, but some, when edited with the contrast and lighting etc we will hopefully use in our final production. The song we have chosen to accompany this montage of clips is "The time (dirty bit) - Black eyed Peas", we thought this just fitted the clips well. Enjoy!
Finally, the filming has begun! The first day filming session was to complete all the "studio" type shots we wanted of Elle, to look it like she was rehearsing the song for her performance. We had spoken to the Photography teacher at our school if we could borrow the studio to film in and to our delight he said we could. It wasn't exactly to how we wanted it to look,but we though with only between 2 and 3 weeks to film, we needed to get as much as done as possible so we had a lot of material to look at when it came to uploading our footage and editing.
This image is similar to the white background that we had, but obviously, Elle was in place where the car was. We played the song over and over several times and and filmed several different camera angles from canted, to aerial (this was completed by standing on top of a chair and having Elle look up towards the camera), close up and also wide shots, to make sure we got the majority of the backdrop in.
We only had the studio fro an hour, but fingers crossed we filmed enough footage on both our digital camera and flip camera in order to produce the shots we originally put on our storyboard that we would like to have in our final video. Overall, the filming went ok, not brilliant as the space we had to move around in was limited, but fingers cross we have achieved the shots we wanted and that we can carry on to this high standard when it comes to filming the rest of our music video.
With our chosen song Pixie lott - Like a Broken Arrow, we have to create a CD digipack to go alongside our music video. In order to achieve this successfully, I am having to undertake some background research on Cd covers and digipacks that are already existent in today's shops. I will look at some of a similar genre to ours which is "pop" and i will also research some that are of a different genre, to see what other contrasting images are used.
