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Evaluation question 4

During our project we used many forms of digital technology. We used a cam corder to do all of the filming:

Once we'd filmed everything we need to put it onto the computer, and use editing software to piece it all together:

And we used Adobe premier pro to edit our film:


And since gaining knowledge of premier pro we intended to use the green screen process:

We also had acces to the recording studio at our school and put this to use and made the song a better quality than it was origionally:

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We have been using blogger to record all our research and planning etc, our video did make it to youtube, but has since been removed.

Since doing this course I have gain a great deal of knowledge of a few very complex items of software and feel I have put my knowledge to use in this project.

Evaluation question 3

Our audience feeback really helped give us a clear idea of where to go with our video. When we had our initial idea we talked to members from our class and asked what they liked about music videos, and they highlighted the catchy beat and the dancing, and this was very much the basis for our video. But then we thought to make it a bit bigger and set up an app on facebook asking people what they liked:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=154333361271508#!/apps/application.php?id=154333361271508&sk=wall

And one of those comments really got my attention. Somebody said they really liked the story, and that although the dancing was nice, it was the story line that made the video. So with this feedback we knew we needed dancing but that it would be even better if the rest of the video had a story line.

When we had completed a rough cut of our video we showed our teacher, and he pointed out a few really easily made mistakes, so we corrected these. When we next showed him our video he'd got another teacher from a differenct school to come in to give us some feedback, and he said that we needed an ending, the begginging didn't quite fit with the speed of the track, we needed to re shoot a certain scene, but that it otherwise met all of it's targets. So we took this feedback and proceeded to make an ending and correct the other little things.

Evaluation question 2

With our main task and our ancillary tasks we wanted to create a feel of being modern and appealing to todays youth, while still clearly being of the dance genre. When we thought about tackling this we decided that the main character in the video should dress like todays youth, jeans and a t shirt etc. So we incorporated this idea onto our digipack, but altered it, so instead of jeans and a t shirt we had jeans and a hoodie. This showed clearly our target audience and gave our character a certain persona that we liked. We followed this through onto our website, with a rolling photo gallery that has lots of pictures like the ones on the digipack.



Our main task was all about dance and music, and we needed to show that in our ancillary task, and one of the easiest was to do this we thought was to have a sound wave on both the digipack and the website. So we played our track on windows media player and print screened a sound wave, then placed this all over our ancillary tasks. It is the centre piece of our digipack where the CD is held, it is the header of the website. I would say that other than the image of DJ Ransome, this sound wave would be our distiguishing feature.

When we knew our target audience was young people, and after we'd created the persona for our main character in the video, and on the digipack, we felt we still needed to do a little bit more to capture our target audience. We search on the internet for a site that allowed us to create graffiti art text, and we then featured this on our digipack. It doesn't however feature any where else in our product, as it would look out of place in the music video, and we wanted the website to be appealing to adults, so that they could use the site to buy tracks/ apparel/ concert tickets, for their children.

As a whole package i think that our project would be easily regonisable to it's target audience, and easily distinguished from other products on the market. It's new, it sticks to conventions, but stands out, and our research into our target audience makes it exactly what they're looking for.

Evaluation question 1

For our main task my group chose to make a music video. We tried to stick to convetions where we could. We found that most music videos, if they weren't depicting a scene at a club, weren't really depicting anything related to the song.



As you can see from the first image, my group created a chart ranking and a visible way of show that in the video, much like music videos today. In shot you can see the main character about to wake up. Now we looked at B.O.B's song Magic we doing our introduction, and found that in that song B.O.B was wearing just his normal clothes. We also saw that the shot was from a higher angle so to stick to conventions we did the same. In our second picture, we've tried to stick to the conventional image of a DJ, by showing him controlling and audio desk. We found that in any video where you did get to see audio desk stuff happen the shot tended to be really close to the hand of the person controlling it, so we stuck to this convention. In the third image we have stuck to the convention of choreographed dance. We did this by asking some of our friends to help us. In a music video by another artist his backing dancers dance in silhouette, and we found this conventional through a lot of other videos too, so we felt it necessary to stick to this convention, and to do that we got our dancers to stand in front of some frosted glass windows on a sunny day, which meant that the camera picked them up in silhouette. During the dance sequence the dancers stick to the beat of the music, and the high and low points in the section, finishing of their first section by doing a movement to mirror that of the music, the music slows down, and the dancers strike a pose and then slowly lower their arm in an ark. The fourth picture is an example of how my group went into flash backs, by turning it black and white, flash backs aren't always seen in music videos, so we chose instead to stick to movie flash back conventions, by making the action black and white. The flash backs forward the narrative of the video, by showing how the mess that he is tiding up got there, or showing what happened with a certain object from the night before. Our product has a very strong feel of a music video, with the song, the strong, but irrelevant to the song, narrative. The dance sequence, the outro being after the music, the chart ranking on the video.


For this task we also had to create some ancillary products, a album digipack, and a website (which didn't have to be live). Both our album digipack and our website link well together, both have the image of a sound wave prominent on them. The album has graffiti art on it, to give the urban feel that we wanted for the persona of DJ Ransome, it also has a panel of pictures, as you might find in an album cover for a band, as well as a page with the song listings, a back cover that has a bar code, a couple of promotional panels which show pictures from the music video, a message from the artist panel,and a front cover which has the album name on it and an image of DJ Ransome. The website is modeled on Usher's website. Our website has the sound wave at the top, where all the link to the other pages are held. There is a short artist bio, as found on Usher's website. Then there is a photo gallery that changes picture every few seconds, and towards the bottom of the page there are details about some up coming events (which aren't real). The background is black and the text is white to stand out. We feel that the website gives a professional feel, but also lacks information.

Digipack construction

This is our front cover. We wanted our artist to have a bit of an edge to him, and be an image our Target audience can relate to and we thought we could achieve this by using graffiti art, as it is commonly linked to the youth, and this is our target audience.

This panel is original art work or the artist, this is common in digipacks, and we wanted to stick to conventions.

This is the track list for the album, which is necessary in a digipack.

This is the panel where the disk will be held.

This is a bio about the artist, we felt it would be a good thing to include as the artist is new and people will want to know a little bit about him

This is our back cover. We found a bar code on the Internet and added it to this panel for authenticity.

Through all the panels there is a running theme, which is the sound wave. We included this as the recognisable feature of this artist, something our target audience will see and link to the artist.

Final piece story board

This is our story board for our final piece. We stuck almost exactly to this story board, and where we left blank spaces we filmed the dance sequence and our clips. The dance also appears early in the final, where it is not included in the story board, this was a decision we made after filming, while editing.

Any post between the 2nd of November 2010 and the 11th of January 2011 are not included in our final project, but I am deciding to keep them as proof of planning, research and construction.

Research into a website

When we set to work on designing a website we had a look at usher's website www.ushernow.com as we liked the layout, three colums all giving information about usher, what he's currently working on, previous gigs, and all other sorts of media. When we looked at weebly (the website we are using to create our site) we realised we couldn't use this format.

Website

Also in the last few months we've started work on the website. We were going to use dreamweaver but decided very quickly that would take too long, so we are usign a site called weebly.com, an online site which allows basic website building very easily and this is what e
we've got so far:



This is the top of our website, the links at the top all direct to a page that reads: currently in progress, as for this unit of our project it was not nessacarry to have more than one functioning page. The wave form is a common theme through out project, it appears in our digi pack also. The text visible reads as follows: DJ Ransome is a peterborough born artist who is very up and coming, he started his music career in his bedroom by using computer software to compose short beat loops, now he has his own collection of youtube videos and is aired on the radio. He focuses manily on dance music, but has progressed to trance and house anthems. He does his own remixs of other artists work, always giving credit where credit is due of course. He is soon to be a hit artist so you should definatly jump on the bandwagon now.



This section of the web page is in the middle, and is a rolling photo gallery. Every few seconds the picture changes.




This section is located at the bottom of the page, and contains two fully functional youtube videos of DJ Ransomes other songs, and information of some events that DJ Ransome is doing soon.

This is the link for the site.
http://a2mediadjransome.weebly.com/

The last few months

The last few months have been pretty hectic, after our last idea went down the drain we had to quickly come up with something original but also creditable, it couldn't be a long shot it had to be a reasonable plan, so after going through a couple ideas, including a poker game (which we decided would of been challenged on for underage gambling), we settled on this: A young male has had a party and a friend over, and made quite a big mess. He wakes up the next morning to the mess and a note from his mum saying she'll be back home from visiting family soon. So a young male has to get rid of his friend and clean the house in thirty minutes. We planned to speed the footage up once we'd filmed it We pitched the idea to our teacher and he said it was good, so we wrote out a story board:

and then worked out where we could do it and when, and then the filming got under way. It went reasonably well on our first time round, we got a handfull of mess and used the house of a friend, with permission of course. We showed the video to our teacher and he gave us a few things we'd overlooked: Our flash back scenes weren't obvious enough, it needed an up beat beggining to fit with the music, we still had to get some choreographed dance, we needed to reshoot our clock, and it lacked a definate ending. We went to work on mending these issues, and now only have a few left, the clock and the beggining, we will be editing in the dance soon. We shot the dance on tuesday, I spent an our doing the lighting rig (pics to be added), and we then got to work, it took about 1 hr 30 in totally, with some practice and technical issues (camera angle and such like), but we are happy with the clips we got by the end of it.

The above pictures are of the lighting rig in the studio where we filmed the dance sequence. The first 4 pictures show the coloured gels we used, red and green in the first, then yellow, blue and purple. The following two are pictures of how the lights looked when they we all on. The final one is myself putting the gels into the lights.

Filming people in pubilc

We wanted to film a selection of school students at busy periods of the school day and then speed the footage up, so we did some research into laws that might prevent us doing this and found that due to a law we would need to get written concent from every student involved, to protect their identity.