In order to add multi-media context to our music video, we decided to create an official Instagram page for Quadratic Formula, our band. Instagram is a photo sharing site which is an app you can download on to your phone or you can log in on a computer. You can have millions of followers and you can follow as many people as you want in order to see their pictures.
Many popular artists such as Beyonce have official Instagrams in order to make her audience feel like they are in her day to day life:
As you can see, Beyonce has 21 million followers but is following absolutely no one. This is a sign that she already had a massive fan basebefore creating her instagram and through word of mouth, using social media and the internet, she has created a huge following of people just wanting to see and know more about her day to day life.
We thought that by creating an official page for our boy band that it would increase our following and make everyone more aware of the style of the band. Although we know our band is not real, it is interesting to find out where this ends up and see what effect it has on social media and also through word of mouth at our college.
Although Quadratic Formula are a new band, I have already gained a following of 18 people who are interested in knowing more about the band. It will be really interesting to see where this ends up.
As our shoot day is over and done with, we decided to created a better rough version of our CD Digipak for our artist, Quadratic Formula. It looks a bit like this:
I am aware that some things are spelt wrong but overall I am happy with the way it turned out. As you can see, we have stuck to three primary colours including black and white for our CD cover. We thought this made the design simpler without it being too boring. As our music video uses a lot of colour, we liked to incorporate this in our CD Digipak by using a well known painting as the background for CD part of the Digipak.
Hopefully this will be improved even further although I really liked the pictures and colours we used and I feel like everything goes well together. I feel like the design brings across the 'boy-next-door' vibe of the band that we were going for.
Whilst editing our music video, we have come across some problems such as videos getting out of sync. This set us back a few hours as we had to correct every scene. Another problem we are facing is keeping the video edgy and interesting without making the video seem jumpy as most of the shots are static. This is an issue we would like to rectify by using split screen which would look a bit like this:
However, this is something that we are keen to move on to due to us not being happy with the rough cut. Although we have a solid rough cut, it will be good to move on to the proper editing using Premiere Pro. These will be good skills to learn so we can use these effects in later projects.
We have realised that continuity within the powder paint sections of our video is also a difficult task to edit. This is because once our actors were covered in paint, there was no easy way to clean them up for the next shot. However, this has proved as detrimental because most of our shots are of them covered in powder paint whereas we don't have many shots of them being initially hit and of them initially throwing the paint. If we were to do our shoot again, we would change this and put more cameras on each person at once. This was impossible as we didn't have the budget.
Currently we are in the editing process of our music video. As the song we picked has a fairly steady beat, it will hopefully be quite easy to create a rough cut.
This year we are using the editing software called Premiere Pro which is a semi-professional editing software system:
This editing software is really easy to use and is similar to the software we used last year. As we intend to use a lot of wipes and split screen, hopefully this system will co-operate with what we want to achieve.
In our first editing session we had to sync all of our videos so that when we eventually wanted to edit the shots where the singer is lip-syncing otherwise it would look weird and out of place. This was a tedious task but now that's it's done we get can started on the more exciting task of editing all our shots together.
On the morning of our shoot day, I felt excited but a bit anxious to start the shoot as we still had a few things to be done before we could start filming. We had not set up the background so this was a task to complete and also there was the dilemma of costumes. The costumes were done very last minute so this is something we would do more in advance if we were to do it again.
I felt like I took up many crucial roles in order to get the day done and dusted in as little time as possible. I think it is fair to say that I took on the role of the director and watched from behind the scenes and told our actors how to improve and how to act. I also took pride in coming up with the ideas for the wipe shots which will be further enhanced in the editing process.
I felt that as the director, I managed most of the actors in our video and some proved a little difficult to work with. As I act myself, it was fairly easy to get everyone's blood pumping and the energy up as it was a Monday morning and I had a feeling a few people wanted to be elsewhere. However, as soon as we got the powder paint out, everybody livened up and did a good job.
On Monday, we had our shoot day for our music video which is something we had all really been looking forward to. After all of our hard work and change of ideas, it was time to finally get the cameras out and make something that we'd been working on for four weeks come to life. Last year, we made thrillers and used cameras called Sony NX5 to create shots, however, this year we used a more professional and advanced camera that included ten or so different lenses that you could switch. One of these included a slow motion lens which would come in handy for our powder paint scenes.
We started off the day by getting all of our cast members dressed and made up for the shoot ahead. Obviously, the girls took longer than the boys but we got this done efficiently within one hour so not much time was wasted. We put all the girls in the same white dresses but with different coloured ribbons as belts:
The boys also wore similar white outfits but instead of ribbon, they wore different coloured braces. We decided to stick with the same colour for the opposing counterpart also. For example, the boy singer was wearing red accessories and so was the girl singer.
The day started off not messy because we were filming shots of just the band in he performance element. This worked out well because it was not difficult and everyone co-operated well to get the job done, including the actors. We got various wide and establishing shots of both bands as well as close-ups to show the detail of the actor's faces and of the musical instruments. A hurdle we hit was that some of our actors could not actually play the instruments they were given which was a bit of a struggle at first, although everyone got into it and looked comfortable towards the end of the day. We also filmed some tracking shots which show the competition between the two bands and we will hopefully edit these to look like wipe shots.
In the afternoon, the powder paint started being thrown. We made sure that every camera and every angle was correct before throwing the paint because it is impossible to get off and start again once it has been thrown. Here is a slow motion video of one of the first throws of powder paint which hit Leona. We tried to make it look as if one of the boys had thrown the paint so therefore threw it from the left hand side. This will be made clear in the editing process:
Once the first bit of paint had been thrown, it became easier and slicker when we threw the next bunch. This element of our video eventually became the easiest one because everyone was so up for it and co-operated well with each other. At the end of the day once we had all of our shots filmed, we decided to do one final slow motion shot of everyone throwing paint at each other. This proved to be a bad idea as it was complete carnage and lots of people ended up getting paint in their eyes. If we were to do a shoot like this again, we would think more carefully about our stupid and dangerous ideas and not do a shot like that again, although it looks great on camera.
Overall, I felt that the day went really well considering it being a very daunting task for all involved. Everything ran fairly smoothly and there were no arguments or disagreements. I feel that the editing process is also very daunting and we will need a lot of help but overall I am happy with the footage we shot as it all looks great.
If I could do the shoot again, I would make sure we were more prepared with our storyboard and with costumes as this provided unnecessary stress during our media lessons. However, everything turned out okay despite this. I look forward to editing the footage and creating a final product from all our hard work.
As our shoot day is coming up, we decided to test out the powder paint we would be using to see if it worked well and stuck to clothing and skin. As all of our cast are going to be covered on Monday, we decided to throw paint at Lulu who was very up for it. Here is how the test went:
As you can see, the paint was very effective in the way it stuck to Lulu. We also discovered that slowing the video down created an even better effect and this is a device we will use on our shoot day. We decided that more than one colour looks a lot cooler than just one so we will use this effect on our shoot day. This also means that if the set is messy with more than one colour then it won't matter for ontinuity purposes if everyone is covered in lots of colours.
Today we had our first rehearsal with the cast of our music video. We had a pretty good turn out and it was good to see everyone come together as the bigger picture wasfinally coming in to focus.
We partnered up our two lookalikes and got them to copy each others movements in order to get the really androgynous feel. We also felt like we wanted some symmetry so we got them to do the same movements in exact unison.
We have another rehearsal planned in which we are going to set up some specific placements and movements for all of our cast and we are looking forward to seeing it all come together on our shoot next Monday.
After doing an initial first draft for our CD Digipak, I decided to do some research into the definition and what a CD Digipak entails. From the Wikipedia website, it says that Digipaks usually have a gatefold (book-style) paperboard or card stock outer binding, with one or more plastic trays capable of holding a CD or DVD attached to the inside.
Seeing as we've already drafted a Digipak and downloaded a template online, the next stage is to start playing about with photoshop in order to create something that looks professional.
We also took a look at a video of Andrew Kelsall explaining his example of a CD Digipak:
We also had a look at the term 'intertextuality' which could potential be a very prominent theme on our Digipak. We will develop this idea further and see where this concept goes towards our final product.
In order to have our full cast which is the size of a whole netball team plus a sub, we needed to get permission from everyone's teachers on the day of the shoot. We found the most effective way was to use Blue Cards which all of the individuals teachers sign and date in consent.
This was a lot easier than us emailing all teachers excusing specific people as we have a lot of other thing to be doing in preparation for our music video shoot. Hopefully we will get these blue cards back in enough time as we have effectively planned two weeks ahead:
