DW: Digipak Draft 1

This is the first complete draft I created on Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Evaluation Q4

Blogger

The first and definitely one of the most vital pieces of technology we used was blogger. Blogger was vital to our research and planning which are 20 % of the marks and all round presenting of our A2 coursework. We used blogger to showcase everything we did on our project from our final cut to the research into genre. We displayed all our research and planning on this website. As well as the research and planning and the final product we also used blogger to showcase our evaluation questions as these again are 20% of the marks.

YouTube

A second very important technology is YouTube. YouTube allows us to showcase our vodcasts and rough cuts and any other videos we wanted to share. YouTube is helpful in many ways for our project, the theory of web 2.0 allowed us to get feedback on our rough cuts from people commenting feedback on our videos. It allowed a platform for all our videos to be showcased and allowed us to share these videos on blogger, which was probably the most important use of YouTube for team DeJaCu. Our evaluation questions are also put onto YouTube which is 40% of the marks.

Final cut pro

Final cut pro was the editing software that we chose for creating our final cut. As well as the final cut we also created many different vodcasts and other videos. When creating our final cut we used many different effects and transitions that are provided by the software. We used several transitions like cross dissolve and flash which both helped make the video have continuity and the all-round quality of the video was improved. We found that final cut pro was very easy to use ad we had used the software last year and had developed some skills in working with it. Not only the final video was created on final cut but all of our evaluation questions were edited on final cut pro. The software is very professional and is user friendly, even used by the famous directors the Coen brothers.

Divshare

We used Divshare for many of our different tasks on our blogs. One use of divshare was to upload Word documents to our blogs; this was greatly helpful as it allowed us to share many different files for our research and planning. We used this to do things like our timing sheet and lyric sheet. Divshare was also used for creating our weekly podasts and allowed us to put the insomnia song on the top of our blogs.

Magazine sites

Magazine sites like Q magazine allowed us to research into the key conventions of magazine advertisements to imitate when making our magazine ad. We looked at many different magazine sites; mix mag, rolling stones, NME, Mojo and many more. These give us a lot of inspiration for our final mag ad.

 Photoshop

Photoshop was vital for producing our digipak and magazine ad, it was an essential. We had no previous experience of using Photoshop, so to begin with it was a struggle to get used to the software. Once we had become used to Photoshop we were able to exploit the range of tools it offered. It allowed us to modify any image we uploaded and we could also download fonts on to the Photoshop software and change the sizes and the positions. There are several different filters to be applied to the images the ones we particularly liked were conte crayon and plastic wrap.

Twitter

Twitter was a great website for us as it allowed us to advertise our film for free. The film industry spend millions on advertising yet one of the best ways is via social networking and that way it is 100% free. Therefore we took this to our advantage and advertised our music video via our own twitter page. It not only helped get our music video out there but it also let us gather inspiration from the people we followed on facebook e.g. faithless and other interesting twitter pages we had found.

Camera

We used a HD camcorder called the -----

Da Font

Da font was used to help create our final digipack and magazine ads. We used this website to search different fonts that would fit in with our final product.

CT: 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 'Insomnia', 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.

Rough cut 3 Audience feedback

Rough cut 4

This is our 4th rough cut we have made many changes the main one being a completely new ending to the video. We will now hope to gain feedback now for our final cut.

Influences on our final cut

one of the main influences on our final cut was obviously faithless. We took a lot of inspiration from many of his common conventions of his music videos. Here is the video we come 1:



This video and many of his other has faithless sitting in some sort of chair when lip syncing his songs. Therefore as a very common convention of his we then decided to use the chair as the performance part of the video. This was a huge positive for our video as we got good feedback from it and it fit well in our video.

On chair in we come 1

 Not only did we use the sitting down part for our performance narrative, we also took the convention of a jacket on without a shirt underneath as this is also a common convention of faithless.

Me sat in the chair.

This is me sat in the chair with some conventions of faithless' videos, sitting in the seat and also with a jacket with no shirt underneath.









Here is the video for enjoy the silence by Depeche Mode:





At around 1:11 the song starts cutting scenes to the beat over an over. This was an inspiration for a lot of the start of our song when we cut several scenes to the beat of the song.

CT: Magazine Ad research and conventions vodcast

This is my vodcast on magazine ad research and the main conventions i have found.