Finishing our media

We have had a lot of problems whlst producing our music video, resulting in our group taking longer then expected to finish the production of our music video. Despite this, there are now no more problems.
The Video itself is now finished and all that needs to be done is to change the format of the video (preferably to mp4) and upload it so that it can be played on other computers.
Also, I need to finish making the digi pack. The front and back cover are both done, now I need to make the advertising poster and the inside of the CD cover. Once these are done, our media product will be finished, meaning I will be able to begin my evaluation of the media product.

Digipack

The front CD cover for the digipack is finished and looks effective. There are a few ideas for the back of the CD cover and I'm unsure which one to go with yet as I want it to look as effective as possible. A likely idea that I will use will be showing the artist in our music video running away from the camera. I think this would be a good idea as it would help show the narrative of the music video.

Both the shots that will be used for the front and back cover of the digipack will be taken directly from the music video because I decided this would be the best possible way to describe the narrative of the video from our CD cover.

The front of the cover will show the evil part of the artist who is in power because of the low angle shot, whilst the back of the CD cover will show the artist running away, so the audience will know he is running away from someone, which shows the narrative.

I have used shots in the CD cover which are conventions of psytrance music. An example would be the light flashing on the artist on the front of the cover. Florescent lights are a convention of parties/ social events where this genre of music is often played, which is why I have incorporated this, to appeal more to our audience.

Another convention included is the use of a canted angle shot in the back cover. This is used to make the image seem eerie, which is a common convention of many psytrance images. Earlier in our project, we searched on Google for psytrance images and they all came up with images that looked 'weird' and distorted. This effect is used to create an eerie feel to the images, which is why I wanted to use this effect in the CD cover.

There are other effects I have used because of conventions of psytrance, which will be explained in my evaluation.

Digipack

Today, I have finished the music video. Now all there is left to do is the digipack. So far, I have done the front cover and back cover.

Despite what we have talked about in previous lessons, I have decided to change the idea of our digipack. Our initial idea for our front cover involved editing two pictures of our artist so that half of his face is smiling and the other half frowning. This was supposed to create the effect that there are two personalities to the artist (one good and one evil), which is how the narrative would have been shown, because the narrative is supposed to portray the artist running away from himself.

The idea now is to show a picture of the evil version of the artist in a low angle shot. I decided to use this idea because I feel it makes the front cover look very effective. The reason for the low angle shot is to make the evil version of the artist look like he is in power, and to show who the main focus of the video is on.

The digipack will be updated soon and images will be uploaded onto the blog.

Editing

Today is editing day, so earlier, I went to e3 to try and edit some of our video. I ran into a few problems because the video and song would not play in Final Cut Express. This is because our video and music files were moved from one Mac to another, since another group were using the Mac we were origionally working on. The problem was that when I tried to play the video and music on Final Cut Express, it came up with a message saying 'some media is missing'. The mp3 file of the music and the video could not be found on the Mac. As a result of this, the video and song were both 'offline'.
When I was in e3 earlier, I figured out how to get the video to play, but the mp3 file for the song is still 'missing', so I will go to e3 later in the day to attempt to solve this problem and continue the editing of the video.

steve's progress

so far i have not done a lot of editing personaly but i have put forward the majority of filming and research + planning. Today i have sat on final cut express and re-arranged the shots into the order stated in my story boards and so far the video is looking a bit rushed and unorganised, although i know this is not the case, so far we have ran into many different problems with cameras, filming techniques and editing styles that actually do not exists which has lead to a few failed shots and the odd smile from our actor when we did not want one.

So far i am very pleased with what has been done and as we have having a planned day off timetable to finish editing i believe this will be finished by thursday evening.

Problem solved!!!!!!

Today we were able to successfully mute the background sound from the origional video recording and we therefore were able to mix the track with our video.

Now, we are able to begin our editing.

Mixing video and audio

I am still in the process of trying to mix the video and the audio together. The video plays fine, but when I attempt to mix it with the mp3 file, it doesn't work. I think this may be because the audio is not yet properly rendered. Another reason for this may be that our music video footage that we currently have on Final Cut Express was recorded with sound. It may be that I need to split the audio from our recorded video in order for it to work.

Today, I will again try to get the audio to play with the video.

Also, we should have the rest of our music video filmed soon so we will be ready to edit.

Music video

Last lesson, we uploaded some of our video footage from our camera onto Final Cut express. Today, I have also transfered our mp3 music file onto Final Cut Express. Right now, the full song and part of our video is on Final Cut Express. In this lesson, I will try to find out how to put the video and song together.

Also, I need to learn how to edit the video properly so that the music video matches the music effectively.

Plan for today!!!!!!!

We are now nearly done with our filming and we just need to film in a couple more locations: the drama studio and somewhere in Newport. I have gone to the drama studio to ask for permission to use it for filming, and we should be able to do some filming during our free periods (2nd, 3rd, and 5th). 

We are planning to get our filming finished very soon and another update will be posted shortly.

final song

on the last Friday before half term we finalized our song. On this day we cut the song down from 6 minutes to 3 minutes and recorded the lyrics onto the song. I then edited the lyrics onto the song and cut them into small samples and spread them over the song. I then put in several effects at the beginning of the first set of lyrics and just before the last set of lyrics. I aim to upload the song to YouTube sometime during this week. this in itself has been a problem because for the past 2 weeks i have been trying different things to upload it without success.

Update

over half term we did the majority of our filming. We still need to film our running scene that we attempted to film several times during dusk period to add a sense of enigma and to try and disguise the face of the runner. We found that it was too difficult to film at night because we lost light too quickly. To overcome this we have decided to film during the day and try to use a hat over the runners face to disguise him,in case we cant make the hat idea work we have a backup plan to use the drama studio as it is predominately all blacked out so we can use spot lights and low key lighting to give our desired effect. We plan to have all of our filming finished today (Monday 2nd November) and after that we can start editing.