CT:Magazine Ad research

For our magazine ad we are taking into account both our primary and secondary audience. For this we may be placing ads in more than one magazine. Different magazines represent a different target audience.

This is my initial knowledge of magazines and their target audiences...

Jay Z on the Rolling Stone cover

• Q magazine - Target audience 25-40
• MixMag - Target audience 18-32
• NME - Target audience 15-24
• Rolling Stone - Target audiences 16-24, 25-40
• Mojo - Target audience 25-40
• Fact - Target audience 18-32
• FHM - Target audience 15-34

Dance specific...

• djmag - Target audience 18-32
• Core - Target audience 25-40
• Maxumi - Target audience 18-32
• OHM - Target audience 18-32

• 

  MixMag Cover

Magazine Ad conventions

From re-searching various magazine ads i have drawn a list of my own magazine ad conventions, these are below...

• The release date
• Album/song title
• Image of album cover/image of artist
• Artist name
• Brief information on the artist/album
• Record label logo

Shoot 5: Shoot: 13th December (narrative, bedroom, tunnel, nightmare)

On the 13th of December we knew that we had to get a rough cut handed in the following week. Therefore, we shot on the friday morning for 3 hours, this was valuable time we needed and we were able to shoot enough footage that we could make a full rough cut out of. 

On this shoot we shot in a number of different locations these consisted of...

• Bedroom
• Garden bench
• Garden wall
• Underpass

These locations worked in our favour as we still had day light as we shot in the morning. Our main character would be doing different things in each scene. These were mostly narrative sequences where our character would be walking or tossing and turning in his bed.

We also used another character on this shoot. This character is signifying the nightmares in our video. The costume mise en scene for our character was black fur hooded jacket and a simple black mask this looked very effective and should work well in our video.  We thought the use of fire would be a good thing to include so we shot the nightmare character burning paper in his hands. The fire also has demonic denotations such as hell and torture which we thought worked well for our nightmare character.

Jake with camera 

One main thing that assisted us during our shoot was a snory camera which provided a CU of our characters face. The snory cam set up was poor and the thing fell apart as we were placing the camera on top of it - though it was previously made by another student. We improvised and got cling film and wrapped it round the camera and the wooden arm.

Behind jake on the picture on the right is the underpass location. this is an abstract location which looks very effective on the camera. We shot a variety of different shot types to make sure we got the variation we needed first time round.

Yet again we encountered the problem of our SD card being full which has brought us to the conclusion that we are going to buy a new one.

Camera 

CT:Faithless The Dance collectable boxset

Faithless are to release a strictly limited edition official book in a collectible box set called The Dance. This includes a book describing their 15 years of success in their own words. The book also includes two limited vinyl discs with a number of exclusive remixes and two cd's and an exclusive print.

This is the link to the pre-order http://faithless.sandbag.uk.com/Store/BoxSet.html

Faithless book cover

The upcoming release of this book shows that there is clearly a market and a wide fan base for Faithless. In retrospect we will be creating a cut down version of something similar to this but just a CD cover. Because we have know where near the budget to produce a piece of merchandise to this standard. However, we can also get some key ideas and inspiration from this for our album artwork and magazine ads.

Book images

There is a key theme throughout the box set as the colours all link together which runs through out the book. The use of images really gives it some flavour and would indulge the reader, which is something we should look to use.

The lead member of the band always looks depressed

Permission Request

In order to use the track 'Insomnia' - Faithless, we would need to request permission from the record label. After looking at the Insomnia Wikipedia page I found that the record label was Cheeky Records/BMG, bearing in mind that BMG is an international conglomerate and the parent company I thought we may be more successful if we were to contact the subsidiary - Cheeky Records.  After extensive searching I found the contact details for Cheeky Records...

This is the email i sent to Cheeky Records...

Hi, I'm creating a music video for Faithless' 'Insomnia' as part of my Media Studies A-Level. This is not for any commercial usage. We would like your permission to use the audio track for 'Insominia', for example when publishing our completed video on YouTube (not least as this helps us gain audience feedback on rough cuts and final cuts of our video). We'd be delighted to discuss the concept we have for this video if you are interested, or to simply answer any further questions you might have. You can also address any queries to Mr Burrowes, Head of Media Studies at the school. 
This is one of our sample clips testing different editing styles, if you would like to take a look at one of the clips we would plan on using.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9X4zkmEP4g

This attempt failed because it wasn't a valid email address. Therefore i went to Faithless' website where there is a contact section, i could copy and paste the same message to the contact box and proceed to send the message in hope of a reply. Because its not a direct email it may be un-likley to get a reply although we are very hopeful.

CT: Mag Ad Research

This is a post that will help us with our digi pack we are creating for our music video. We will be creating album artwork and a magazine add for the song 'Insomnia' by Faithless. To begin we are going to look into previous album covers that were used by Faithless and seeing if we can pick out any conventions or any techniques we could use.

Back cover

Faithless - Greatest hits 2005

In this cover the singer looks un happy, this may be because all of his songs have negative connotations or it could either be following on from some of his music videos. The ones i have looked at such as 'Mass Destruction' and 'Muhammed Ali' the videos are very abstract, and this is where the no shirt idea is taken from. Because in Mass Destruction, Maxi Jazz is sitting down in a blazer with no shirt on.

Front cover

Also having the male by him self on the front cover looking down is a gender representation signifying a dominance from this performer.

However on the flip side he is standing imtimately with a woman which may signify equality between sexuality. This is one of the things i picked up on when analysing his videos, in Mass Destruction a counter-type is used as the females play the drums and guitar which would usually be performed by male characters.









This Ad is a very simplistic design, though it still follows the main magazine ad conventions. The artist, the title of the album, and the date theses are probably the main ones that would be found on any magazine ad and digipack as you can see from the examples below. The mag ad is on a plain background with a single image in the center, there is a variation in the font size however the font stays the same. The red shirt worn be the person in the image makes the ad stand out, in magazine ads there is usually one aspect that will draw someones attention.

Faithless' We Come 1 magazine ad follows all three conventions which i mentioned above and is again a very simplistic magazine ad design, this will be a factor of the post modernist movement as if this was compared with the magazine ad below there is a clear change in image and colour of the magazine ad. The add contains a picture of two of the artists from faithless which is usually a regular thing when it comes to magazine ads having a picture of the artist or band.

This is a digipack cover Faithless produced for their final ever album called The Dance, which i have blogged on Faithless The Dance Collectable Box Set. This is a very bright cover and has a very large contrast of colours to make the image stand out. This cover is very effects heavy and has minimalist text, this is one of Faithless' magazine ad conventions as most of the mag ads and album covers don't include an extensive amount of text and a significant amount less when compared to other artists in  the Dance/House genre.

Sample scene 4 feedback

Sample scene 3 feedback

Sample scene 2 feedback no.2

Shoot 4: Shoot: 4th December (narrative, curly hill woods)

On the 4th of november we decided we would use our lesson time to shoot a proportion of our narrative scenes. 

Once again we did not stick to our shooting schedule.

We shot in two different locations these were Brooke street bridge over the river river Wharfe and Middleton woods at the top of Ilkley. When filming on the bridge we aimed to use a variety of shots including LS, OTS, CU ect. Our character would proceed to walk along the bridge and stop to look down at the river. We carefully framed our shots so that there were no cars or other people on show, this was because we wanted to show our characters isolation to the world and we thought if we included cars in these abstract shots it would affect our preferred reading.

When shooting in the woods the backdrop was perfect as the sun was just rising so it gave our shots an early morning effect which is what we want to achieve as are character would be awake in the early morning. Again we used a variety of shots which we aim to use for our narrative scenes as our character walks through these woods. We differentiated between POV shots and OTS shots as well as MS, LS and ELS. One shot which we thought would particularly work well was a POV shot which the camera tilted to look up at the trees and then rotated quickly. This could be a possible conventional ending point but also the sky could signify dreams, which he is hoping for but he cannot sleep.

One problem we encountered was our SD card being full which was a problem to a certain extent. As a result of this, we had to delete footage, though this was luckily on our Mac. We are planning to buy a bigger SD card or even better several and we can appoint certain scenes to certain memory cards to help organisation and time management.

Shoot 5: shoot: 6th December (narrative)

On friday the 6th of december we are going to shoot several different narrative scenes at my house and in and around ilkley. This will be our 5th shoot and will get us on our way to our first rough cut.

Sample Scene 2 feedback

This is feedback for our time lapse experiment, the outcome was very good and what we are hoping to hear when we get audience feedback. Also she gave relevant ways to improve the video which was good as they were only slight improvements that can be altered quickly.

Sample Scene 1 feedback

This is our first piece of audience feedback we got from our sample sequence one. Our feedback was from our target audience which is god as we could get ideas from our peers as well as them being our target audience. This was the edit that Declan did with the layering of our main character sitting in his chair. In the final cut pour character will be lip syncing in these performance shots.

Promotional video

This is our promotional video that was created at the schools creative arts evening. We went with a viral video that encourages people to 'sit in the chair' by using the slogan 'do you dare to sit in the chair?' here is our final viral vid:

Shoot 4: Planning: 3rd December (skatepark, bedroom, brooke street)

As our third shoot didn't go as according to plan as we had hoped. Therefore, we will be using our shooting schedule the third shoot for our forth shoot to save time because we have missed some vital shots and scenes that still need to be done. As a result, it is arguable to say that we are behind schedule now however, we will be using the time we have left efficiently to get our full rough cut shot and edited.

 

Shooting schedule shoot 3 from CurtisTiplady 

Shoot 3: Planning: 28th November, field, skatepark, Ilkley, graffiti wall

This is a post on our planning for the third shoot we are going to do we have focused on the key locations where we will be shooting at, and will be shooting both narrative and performance footage and hopefully we will have enough footage to create our first rough cut. From previous experiences we know that we have to plan our shoots before hand to use our time a lot more efficiently. 

Here is our shooting schedule for our third shoot



For our third shoot we are planning on shooting at five different locations as you can see from the shooting schedule above. Luckily two members of the group can drive therefore we can fit the chair in the back of the car and use it in any ideal location.

Shoot 3: Shoot: 29th November

Shoot 3: Shoot: 29th November

We shot today and the shoot didn't exactly go according to plan because we ran out of valuable time, we also only used two locations as appose to the three/four we were planning on using, also again light was a problem as we were shooting towards the end of daylight hours.

Nevertheless we managed to shoot two key scenes and sequences that we amy be using in our final cut.  These were a shot we were experimenting with on a mattress we were using. Our main character would be rolling around on this emphasising his lack of sleep. We also used the chair prop in a different location with a field in  the backdrop and we plan on using the layering editing tool to overlap theses shots into one.

Therefore, we will be using our shooting schedule for this shoot for our forth shoot to save time because we have missed some vital shots and scenes that still need to be done. As a result, it is arguable to say that we are behind now however, we will be using the time we have left efficiently to get our full rough cut shot and edited by the 4th of december or the 6th if time is needed.

Creative arts evening

On creative arts evening we plan to do this clip however get people to volunteer to sit in the chair. This will hopefully be like a free advertising strategy as clips like this have the ability to go viral on youtube and social networking sites.




We will bring the chair we used in this clip into school and then ask people to sit in the seat and do movements or lip synch. We will then quickly take the footage and edit it. We will then show this to the person either face to face or post it on youtube the next day.




As well as this we will also get volunteers to sit in the chair and  lip synch some of the lyrics. We will then edit these shots into our short rough cut that lasts around 60 seconds and then show the volunteer the results. this will create a great secondary video for our group, having lots of different shots of different people.

Mise En Scene - costumes tbc

When we went to shoot our sample footage we decided to go with this as costume as we were just shooting sample footage. This costume is now our narrative costume apart from i'm wearing different shoes and a Wight Tshirt.

For our final performance costume we have gone for very similair as this insomnia video. We have used black trousers a grey blazer and white shoes. We thought this was a very unique costume and a convention used in faithless videos.

Sample scene 4

When shooting we shot lots of me lip synching. We did this on the chair and lip synched the whole thing. Here is the outcome and a few points about it:



Mise En Scene
When shooting we took advantage of what we think is great mise en scene. We asked people what they thought of the background and they loved it, as it was urban and looked very effective. The graffiti is used in lots of music videos like Blue-one love as it gives the video an urban feel.


Feedback

We then got feedback on our video. The main piece of feedback was that there should be more emphasis when lip synching the words. People said i didn't put enough emotion into it and could be more clear with my lip synching. However they liked the mise en scene and some of the footage they said was really good but the best bits need cutting and small bits put into the video not one long bit

Editing
The editing of this clip was incredibly easy as i just matched the audio to the visuals of me lip synching. As soon as i did this the clip started to look very good and our team were happy with the results. As well as just dragging the audio, with like all of the other videos we chose the black and white effect to represent the dark place he is in.

Sample scene 3

 When on our shoot we decided to have a shot of me tapping my foot against the wall to the beat as we thought it would be an effective shot and have seen it in many different music videos like George Michaels Faith. I then edited the clip to the beat and found it quite effective.







As we have gone with the idea of having a black and white music video, when editing we always use the black and white to see how it looks. This is because it is not a definitive decision to go with black and white. if it looks good in colour we can discuss and decide whether or not we should keep with the black and white idea

CT:Sample scene 2

This is our sample scene two where i experimented with different editing techniques. This is rough but it gives us and idea of how it will look when it comes to the actual shoot and we know what we need to do when it comes to changing it.

Our Twitter page

Our twitter page

Our group have created a new Twitter with the username TeamDeJaCu. We will use this twitter as an advertising tool and to let people know about our group and what we're planning to do. Here is our twitter account!
















As well as just setting up our twitter and tweeting we have also followed influential twitter pages. One of these pages was beggars group media. A media group responsible for videos from the likes of Bon Iver. They are an english group and they are a company we take inspiration from.
We also followed Faithless as he is the artist of the video we are doing and we take many ideas from his work as inspiration.                                                                                                                                                                              

CT: Mise-en-scene The Chair

THE CHAIR:

Muhammed Ali

What we have found is that in many of Faithless' music videos is that Maxi Jazz when he is lip syncing is usually in a stationary position. He is usually either standing up straight or sitting down.

We took particular interest in the music video Take The Long Way Home by Faithless as they use an old looking armchair for Maxi Jazz to sit on whiles he's singing, and we're planning on incorporating this in our music video and will form an intertextual link with Faithless' other videos, but also it's common

Take The Long Way Home

for juxtaposition to be used in Faithless' videos
for example in Take The Long Way Home Maxi Jazz
is seen sitting on an arm chair in front of a moon in his
 armchair and these two things are very juxtaposed, and
with our music video we're planning on shooting with an
 armchair in the middle of a field to achieve juxtaposition.

Like in the video Take The Long Way Home we are in the process of planning our green screen shot where we plan on shooting our main character sat in his chair with the green screen behind him. One of the main factors of this is choosing the visuals that will go behind our character whether they will be moving or a still image, it may be the safe option to use a still image however, using a moving background could be equally effective.

DW: Sample scene 1

From our shoot on the 16th November we managed to get a scene where our main character is sat in an arm chair on a field, and in this scene we wanted to see if duplicating the character in the armchair would work, and to do this we had to keep the camera rolling in one long take and in the same position whiles we moved the armchair in different positions.

Editing:
With the editing for this scene we had to use the blade tool to chop up the long take that we took and then separate the clips that had the armchair in different positions, we then re-timed each clip so that they were all the same length and then layered them over the top of each other by cropping each clip to the point where you could see each clip in the same scene.

The Clip:

Shoot 2: 16th November, graffiti wall, field shot

On the 16th of November we decided that we would shoot during our media lesson at 9.00 Am due to our locations brainstorm we knew the locations we would be shooting at. Because of problems last time due to lack of planning we fully prepared with our storyboard. Therefore, we shot everything we set out to do, which was to get the lip syncing footage from two different locations, these were:

• The Ben rhydding field behind Declans house 
• The graffiti wall

These locations were ideal for some of our lip syncing sequences because we used an abstract backdrop which worked extremely well as the mise en scene of the graffiti on the back wall signifies a 'badboy' role which is what we hope will be our preferred reading from our target audience.

Here is our behind the scenes footage:

In this shoot we used a major prop which was the arm chair, when looking at faithless' previous music videos he seems to be sitting down frequently and we thought it may be a good idea to experiment with a shot like this. In the end we decided we really liked the look of our character lip syncing whilst he is sat in the chair. These are shots we plan to experiment entirely with to get the perfect shot of our character.

We used one shot where we kept the camera in the same position but moved our character in his chair to different parts of the field that our character was in which worked very well as we plan on cropping clips and layering them over one another to get a consistent shot of our character in 5 different positions in one shot.

Also we plan on using a time lapse, for this we filmed the chair in one location as our character sat in many different positions. when speeded up we feel that this will look very effective.

On our next shoot we plan to:

• Use storyboards more frequently
• Be prepared for weather conditions (umbrellas ect.)
• Shoot the narrative aspect of our video
• Have a full call sheet written up in which we can refer to when shooting

CT:2nd SHOOT 16th November

On the 16th of November we decided that we would shoot during our media lesson at 9.00 And due to our locations brainstorm we knew the locations we would be shooting at. Because of problems last time due to lack of planning we fully prepared with our storyboard. Therefore, we shot everything we set out to do, which was to get the lip syncing footage from two different locations, these were:

• The Ben rhydding field behind Declans house 
• The graffiti wall

These locations were ideal for some of our lip syncing sequences because we used an abstract backdrop which worked extremely well as the mise en scene of the graffiti on the back wall signifies a 'badboy' role which is what we hope will be our preferred reading from our target audience.

Here is our behind the scenes footage:

 

In this shoot we used a major prop which was the arm chair, when looking at faithless' previous music videos he seems to be sitting down frequently and we thought it may be a good idea to experiment with a shot like this. In the end we decided we really liked the look of our character lip syncing whilst he is sat in the chair. These are shots we plan to experiment entirely with to get the perfect shot of our character.

We used one shot where we kept the camera in the same position but moved our character in his chair to different parts of the field that our character was in which worked very well as we plan on cropping clips and layering them over one another to get a consistent shot of our character in 5 different positions in one shot.

Also we plan on using a time lapse, for this we filmed the chair in one location as our character sat in many different positions. when speeded up we feel that this will look very effective.

On our next shoot we plan to:

• Use storyboards more frequently
• Be prepared for weather conditions (umbrellas ect.)
• Shoot the narrative aspect of our video
• Have a full call sheet written up in which we can refer to when shooting

Faithless feat. Dido - One Step Too Far

Yet again we see another shot of faithless sat down lip synching the words. This is a common convention of faithless videos and something we have done on our first shoot.

This next point isn't so much a convention of faithless videos but more so with dance videos. This is using nightclub shots in the music videos, like dido in the middle of the dance floor of the nightclub. As it is intended to be played in a nightclub it is like an advertisement to show people what it would be like dancing to.

There is a shot here again of a nightclub scene. This is however behind DJ decks which looks really effective. It shows everyone dancing to the track and goes well with the beat.

Call sheet

Call Sheet TBC from CurtisTiplady

DW: Faithless-Take The Long Way Home

ACT: Faithless

TRACK: Take The Long Way Home

YEAR:  1998

0-47

1.  The framing in this shot is a key element to some of Faithless's video as they frame the artist, Maxi Jazz, at the bottom rather than centre framed , and they have a larger image in the background. 

Long shot 0-43

2. This scene uses juxtaposition well and it's common for Faithless to incorporate juxtaposed ideas in the music videos, it works well here as there's Maxi Jazz sat in an arm chair in the centre of the frame with the moon behind him in the background, and this is juxtaposed as these two elements don't look right together.

Black&White

3. It's also common for his videos to be dark and for his clothing to be dark, in this scene they've applied a black and white tint over the scene to give it this dark effect.