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A sound presentation of the CD digipak design and the importance of album covers - albeit concise woork. I feel that you could have developed research more into the conventions of Album digipak's and addressed layout and design more closely. What initial design's into CD covers for your group artist and consideration to target audience have you made?

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Exellent outstanding work on CD covers.  Well done.

Our digipak Design

This is the digipak design which we have come up with after our research and our final could probably look a bit like this.

Digipak Research

For our Digipak design, we started to design a cover each, trying to find the right style for the cover. After designing our own CD covers, we all looked at each one and started cominh up with an overall concept, using certain parts from each design.

This is the very first cover we designed. This cover was designed by our whole group. I quite like it as it is a visually interesting, yet quite simple design. The graphics behind the writing were taken from teh internet, and it fit well with our original concept, until we changed it.

This cover was designed by Will Day, using the sea to show their relaxed attitude and their image, along with the crowd to show their popularity. I really like the simplicity of the font on this design and I think it would be good to use for our final design.  

This cover was designed by Richard Hill. Once again this is a very simple cover, and that's exactly what I like about it. I love the colour schemes used, since it moves very much within the blue and green range, and due to the picture I think it would fit quite well to our band. The only problem I see with this is that it might be too individual for our band since it looks more like a radio head cover. I do think that we could use the colour scheme for our final design.  

This is the CD cover which I designed. I used the lights because it reminded me of a house party, and therefore represented our video, which therefore also represented the image we were setting up for it. Then I put the girl in it, also reminding of the video, although I think that for a debut album we should put the band member on the digipak rather than the girl starring in the video. Then I also used a mix of different bodypaints in UV paint which represented the casual yet indie image of our band. I think in our final design we might make use of the lights and possibly of the colour scheme.

This cover was also designed by Will Day. What I like about it is the use of different colours on it, reminding f a colour wheel and in terms of colour I think our final design might end up looking a bit like this. I don't think however that we will be able to use that writing, as it might not work with our design, and I'm not sure the colour will work either. I like the simplicity of the design.

This Cover was designed by Richard Hill. I really like the background of the cover. He made use of the little party lights which we might use for our final design and which I also used for my album cover. Also the use of the moon reminds of the image of the band, although there was also a big focus on the moon in the original MGMT video, which is probably why we won't use it in our design. I am also not sure about the writing, it is too agressive for that kind of design.

This cover was designed by Ian Heritier. I like the rainbow scheme of colours in the middle of it and it might be used for our final design as well. I am not sure about the rest though since it is very dark and possibly too agressive for the image we are going for. I quite like the simplicity of the writing and I hope we might use it in our final design as well.








After designing our own album covers we also started really researching into existing artists and their album covers. There are certain conventions for digipaks which have to be kept up, in order to fulfil the audience's expectations.

Every digipak should contain the artist's name, the title of the album, the titles of the different songs, the price or bar code, if it's a debut band an image of the band. There are also certain 'rules' which are normally applied to digipaks. They normally make use of four to six colours and two different fonts. And normally the song titles are the same font as the album title.

Except for the layout, you also have to think about the meaning behind your album cover. Often album covers are Polysemic- meaning that they are open to different interpretations. The album cover should link to the style (both music and star persona) in which you are selling your artist. So a cover for a pop star will look different than a cover for an emo band. In order to alert the audience to your album cover if they are just skimmingcertain ones, you need a good design. Often artistic directors use intertextual references to make the audience 'identify' and also to show creativity and give the viewer a certain sense of familiarity through the use of those links. One very common intertextuality is the use of fine art to inspire album covers. 

For example, Silverchair used a Mondrian inspired album cover to sell their album 'Young Modern'. This works well together since the title is 'Young Modern' and Mondrian's work is considered to be very modern, due to his use of vivid colours and shapes.      

Milla Jovovich then used a religious painting to illustrate her album cover for 'The Divine Comedy'. This is an intertextual reference to Dante's epic poem on the afterlife, which was written in the 14th century. The painting also shows a version of the afterlife, which links the title of the album to the painting used to illustrate it. The naked woman on the cover, sells her star persona in a way since it sexualizes the album, although that is the original painting.   

For this album cover, the intertextual reference used, was to link her cover to Andy Warhole's work. The style of his work was pop art, possibly linking to the fact that Madonna is a Pop artist, linking in a word play. Warhole's most famous pieces of work include pop art pictures of Marylin Monroe which this is quite clearly referencing to, even in terms of the hairstyle and the beauty mark. By using this intertextual reference Madonna is selling herself as an iconic figure.








In terms of intertextual reference I have to admit that we have not been as creative and clever about our digipak designs. We have purely gone for the visual representation of our artist's style which probably works quite well for us, as we are promoting a debut album. So overall I think the research we did into different album covers is really interesting and helpful to inspire our use of style, but at the moment we are not making many intertextual references.  

Organizing Our Cast

Since our shoot is on a Friday, this has proved more difficult than we thought it would be. We found that some of our cast could not stay past 4 o'clock on a friday and we also encountered some clashes with different activities. Therefore we decided to rearrange our shooting schedule, so that we would do the narrative in the morning and the performance in the afternoon, planning that we would need less people for the performance aspect than we would for the narrative.  Our new shooting schedule:

Studio Narrative Shots ‘Normal’ - 9:00 - 11:00

MCU- Dude enters door, goes right
MCU - Dude grabs drink, walks off left
POV - Holding Drink
Profile Shot - ‘Electric Girl’ dancing
MCU - Girl dancing
MCU - Dude sees girl
Close Up - "
MCU - Girl turns and looks over
ECU - Girl's eyes
Wide Shot - Dude starts dancing over
Two Shot - Both dancing
Details - Dancing
Close Up - Them getting closer
Close Up - Dude closing eyes
Close Up - Him opening eyes (electric blue lenses :)
Wide Shot - Band's POV, them kissing


Studio Narrative Shots ‘Electric’ [UV] - 11:00 - 13:00 (lunch)
Profile - Them getting out of the kiss
Zoom out - Changed surroundings into 'electric craze'
Wide Shot - Crowd Party
MCU - Crowd members dancing
Wide - Crowd Part
Details of Dancers (UV paint etc.)
Funky Disco Ball
Wide Shot - Lasers and Smoke and crowd
Crane Shot - Aerial view of band from front
OTS Shot - Girl smiling at guy while dancing
OTS Shot - Guy dancing with girl
OTS Shot - She pulls him into the crowd
MCU - he follows her
Profile - Kiss (fade out)

Studio Performance shots [UV] - 13:30 - 18:00

Wide Shot - Whole Band
Close up full frontal - Singer
MCU - Singer
Profile Shot - Singer
Staggered Profile Shot - Singer 1+2
MCU - Guitarist
ECU - Guitarist’s Fretboard
ECU - Guitarist tapping foot
MCU - Bassist
Close Up - Bassist’s right hand
Wide Shot - Synth/Drum player
ECU - Fingers on Drum-machine
Close Up - Synth
Detail Shots (time allowing)

Guildford - Semi-detached average dwelling. Post 18:00

Exterior Shot - People arriving at house party. (Better if in twilight.)
Exterior Shot - People leaving house party (Must be night-time.)

Track Permission Letter

Hurtwood House School

Holmbury St. Mary

Dorking, Surrey

RH5 6NU

Columbia Records UK
Derry Street
London W8 5HY




To Columbia Records UK,


We are a group of A Level students working on an A Level project for a qualification in Media Studies. We are writing to request permission to use the following track as part of this project:

Electric Feel- MGMT


With your permission the track would be used as the accompaniment to a short form video that is made purely for assessment purposes and will have no commercial usage. The video will be viewed only by members of the school community and the assessor of the examination board.


The artist and the copyright holder will of course be fully recognised in the pre-production and evaluation material that accompanies the project. We can also include a full copyright notice if required both in the planning material and on the video itself.


Yours sincerely


Ian Heritier, Nicola Duckert, Richard Hill and Will Day


Hurtwood House School

Shooting Schedule

"Electric Feel’ - Lanmou

Shooting schedule - 18th November 2011

Studio Performance shots [UV] - 9:00 - 13:00
Wide Shot - Whole Band
Close up full frontal - Singer
MCU - Singer
Profile Shot - Singer
Staggered Profile Shot - Singer 1+2
MCU - Guitarist
ECU - Guitarist’s Fretboard
ECU - Guitarist tapping foot
MCU - Bassist
Close Up - Bassist’s right hand
Wide Shot - Synth/Drum player
ECU - Fingers on Drum-machine
Close Up - Synth
Detail Shots (time allowing)


Studio Narrative Shots ‘Normal’ - 14:00 - 16:00
MCU- Dude enters door, goes right
MCU - Dude grabs drink, walks off left
POV - Holding Drink
Profile Shot - ‘Electric Girl’ dancing
MCU - Girl dancing
MCU - Dude sees girl
Close Up - "
MCU - Girl turns and looks over
ECU - Girl's eyes
Wide Shot - Dude starts dancing over
Two Shot - Both dancing
Details - Dancing
Close Up - Them getting closer
Close Up - Dude closing eyes
Close Up - Him opening eyes (electric blue lenses :)
Wide Shot - Band's POV, them kissing

Studio Narrative Shots ‘Electric’ [UV] - 16:00 - 18:00
Profile - Them getting out of the kiss
Zoom out - Changed surroundings into 'electric craze'
Wide Shot - Crowd Party
MCU - Crowd members dancing
Wide - Crowd Part
Details of Dancers (UV paint etc.)
Funky Disco Ball
Wide Shot - Lasers and Smoke and crowd
Crane Shot - Aerial view of band from front
OTS Shot - Girl smiling at guy while dancing
OTS Shot - Guy dancing with girl
OTS Shot - She pulls him into the crowd
MCU - he follows her
Profile - Kiss (fade out)

Guildford - Semi-detached average dwelling. Post 18:00

Exterior Shot - People arriving at house party. (Better if in twilight.)
Exterior Shot - People leaving house party (Must be night-time.)

Feedback

This is excellent work - there are evident clear accounts of your planning and research for your music video production day after half term. I like the way in which decision making is evident along with reflection and revisions.
Your cast list has been agreed and you need to be working on the set design and organisation of production. The prop list could have been evaluated, rather than simply listed, also see the point below

There are one or two ways to develop the blog. First to begin using a wider range of blogging tools - there are lots of well presented images, but use of Flickr or powerpoint will increase the creativity that is shown on your blog.

Second the valid, detailed and reflective comments that you make need to be developed further with key media concepts and theoretical ideas; for example, link the planning to star image, or how set design and lighting link to mise en scene and/ or what model's of lighting you are using in relation to your set - key, fill, directional, discuss the intensity and colour and what you are trying to represent about your artist.

This will help make a more thorough evaluation of your work. Well done.

Set/Lighting Designs and Feedback

After having completed our set design, we talked to a lighting designer about our lighting ideas in order to get feedback on the different possibilities. We started by explaining our concept of the video, explaining how the light would link into that. So we went from having different colourful lights in the corners, which tint the room, and having lighting set up to light the stage, to some a lot more interesting lighting. After the talk we decided to extend the electric feel passage of the video, which then affected the lighting. So we decided to keep the disco ball, reflecting different colour lights and we also decided to keep the naturalistic lighting at the beginning. 

One idea which someone had was to drill holes through the floor and have colourful beams coming from below, which was the vetoed since that would make the infra structure weaker, and could therefore provide a health and safety issue. We have now decided to do the same thing, but drill holes through the walls and have the lights come from the wall. This should make the lighting a lot more interesting once our protagonist has the 'electric feel'. We will also have a UV lighting since we will paint the dancers in UV paint and that gives the whole party a more interesting touch.  

In terms of the set design, we aren't changing a lot, but we were told that we had to start thinking about making the house look more like someone's parent's house, as the party is a house party. So we started thinking about walls, windows, floors and furniture. We now need to start looking for more old fashioned furniture in order to make the starting set more naturalistic. 

So overall we did not have that much change to our plans, except for little adjustments to make it all look more naturalistic and realistic. I like our new lighting concept, since I think that it will make the video more interesting overall.  

Prop List

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfp3q3jt_560hrxmd4fn

Evaluation of making the Animatic

Making the animatic, was actually quite a long task overall. We started by drawing our storyboards, so we had every shot. Then we cut the storyboard up, in order to have the individual shots. We then pinned them up on a wall and shot each piece of the storyboard for 10 seconds, in order to ensure we had sufficient material for the animatic itself.

Once we had shot the pictures, they were uploaded onto the computer and along with our music, we started editing them together. This was quite a basic task of putting the images in the order in which we wanted to have them in the real thing, and timing it with the music. So you can't say that the task was difficult it just took a very long time.

I thought, as a group we worked very efficiently when shooting the storyboards, and we got it done pretty quickly. I just think that we could have worked a bit better in terms of organization, since it took quite a while to get each shot up and focus and frame it.

In terms of editing I also think we worked quite well together. This time we had a better structure to it, because we put our shots into two bins, 'Narrative' and 'Performance' (as shown on the left). We then also labelled the individual narrative shots, in order to make everything easier to find. Then once we had gotten the music onto final cut, we started setting the markers on the beats (as shown on the right). This took way too long I found, as our song is actually 3 minutes and 50 seconds, and labelling every fourth beat takes up a lot of time. I am however glad we did it, as it made the overall editing process easier, especially once we started putting the shots together. Putting the shots together was just like editing any video, where we had to be careful how much performance aspect there was compared to the narrative, and whether everything was in proportion. One problem we had when we were editing, was that we noticed that we were missing quite a few detail shots, which we didn't storyboard, but which would make the video more interesting. So we noted those down and used text over the shots at times, to illustrate the missing shots. 

So overall I think that doing the animatic was extremely useful, mainly because it showed us which shots we needed to include when shooting, which therefore helps us to schedule our shooting day and it also showed us that we will need to start the 'electric feel' section earlier on, in order to make the video more exciting.  

This is a screen recording, from when we edited our animatic:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B8uvPz7iPH4JODljYzU0MjEtMTQzYy00ZTc5LTlkZDUtYzQ1ZWUzYmYyYmI1&hl=en_US   

Costumes

Our Costumes were a little bit more complicated to decide upon than our props. We have one main change in the whole MV, which is when our protagonists gets the electric feel, and sees everything in a different light.

Protagonist:

He starts off wearing just skinny jeans and a t-shirt, pretty much just everyday clothing.

After he gets the electric feel, he will look more individual and unusual than before. We were thinking about going for a Jimmy Hendrix kind of look for that. 

'Electric Girl': She is going to be dressed slightly unusual from the start, representing the electric feel.

 

Her clothing should be very floaty, I think, i.e. a floaty dress or tshirt, possibly a headband. This should represent an indie look, completed by the indian headdress. She might have some UV paint on her or she might be wearing something that is UV just to make her stand out, some more.

Dancers:

The dancers will be wearing, tighter clothing, possibly UV or just black, and they will have some simple patters on them, formed by UV paint. This will stand out very clearly especially after the protagonist has the electric feel.

Band:

I think the band will either be dressed like the protagonist before the electric feel, or like the protagonist after the electric feel. Possibly the one after, since that would be more interesting visually.

Timeline

This is our intial timeline which we created once we had established our concept, in order to help us structure our video in our heads. 

The Timeline was important for us to work out in which key parts of the song certain events were going to happen. This is essential as in our heads, it all works but if it doesn't work on paper, we need a new idea. Through making the timeline, we soon discovered that our narrative was going to be very short, and gave us the idea to review it.

Our Animatic

Our Cast

Except for a whole lot of party members, we have two main cast, three main band members and five dancers. Our two main cast are:

Edward Nightingale: Even though he is an A2 student, from past experience we know that he can act and would fit the role exactly. From seeing him in drama productions last year, we know that he can act well

Ella Denton: Was our second choice for the ‘Electric Girl’, and we chose her in the end because our first choice looked to similar to the main character we were casting and we need contrast between the two. She also does drama, which is why we chose her over our first choice.





Our Band:

Tom Barnett: Our Bassist/ Background Singer











Philip von Drechsel: Our Synth Player













Dancers:



Bethany Quinn: She is also choreographing the dance and teaching it to the other four Dancers. 

Paula Riemann, Elle Banstead Salim, Jessica Wilson and Sophie Ritter.

Institutions for my Band

The record company which my artist is signed to is Domino Records. The record label is an individual company mainly based in London. It has a wing based in the US and it has imprints on 'Geographic Music', 'Double Six Records', 'Weird World Record Co', 'Ribbon Music' and 'Rekords Rekords'. We picked the record company because it has some artist's which are similar to the band which we are promoting. 'Arctic Monkeys' are signed with 'Domino Records' and since they are quite mainstream in terms of their music and yet they are still signed with an individual company, I thought that this would fit our band very well too. 


The record company do not have many implications in terms of resources, except for the fact that they are still considered an individual record company and therefore might not have as much money to manufacture artists. And although individual labels look a lot more at creativity and actual talent than major labels do, they still need to earn money with it. Therefore they might have problems marketing bigger bands to a mainstream audience as they are missing the resources to do so. Since they don't have that many mainstream bands they are fine with marketing and promoting their clients as they are. 


Our taget audience would be young adults aged 15-25 both male and female. Their social/working class would be B-C and they would have a risktaking lifestyle. The kinds of teenager this would include would be trendies, innovators, rebels and groupies.