Reflection on our story board

It was quite interesting to look back on our storyboard and see how much we stuck to it. The first few frames are the same as the storyboard - quite long shots of Alannah and Joe separately, establishing the scene. However, we added in the idea of using the mirror in the frame after we did our storyboard, after we watched Katy Perry's Thinking of You music video.
The majority of our past montage shots are also similar to our story board, except we added more of the handheld camera as once we started doing that, we really loved it so added much more than we originally planned we would.
We also added more shots such as Joe looking towards the door as he hears the knock, and the end shot which fades up into the sky, but overall we did stick to our storyboard quite well except for the addition of some new shots.

Editing Diaries (uploaded later)

Our editing has gone really well and we are all contributing new ideas and effects to help improve it.

ROUGH CUT EDITING
Wednesday 19th October:
Today we imported the song we're using into Final Cut, and loaded our shots. We've started the basic placing of our shots ready for our rough cut deadline, and added the whole shot of Joe singing the entire song on the timeline, so we can pick and choose what parts we want to show of that.

Thursday 20th October:

Using 'Color Corrector' to make a golden/pink hue

The outcome of our experimenting - the colouring we're using for our montages

Today we added more shots and started focusing on the colouring of our shots - we've started to experiment with the contrasts and brightness of the black and white shots. We also have decided on our golden/pink hue using colour corrector (shown above). We've also added most of our shots, except there is about a 15 second part where it is just Joe singing - we need to refine this.
We have received the feedback of our rough cut (blogged).

Wednesday 2nd November:
We blogged our rough cut, and organised our feedback which we also blogged.


FINAL CUT EDITING DIARY
Thursday 3rd November
After our feedback, we are experimenting with more effects and filters. We added in a cross dissolve to the start of the montages which creates a really nice effect as you see Joe singing on the left, as the couple bike into the shot from the right, creating a perfect framework.

Editing our piece - as you can see, we have perfected our golden tones and have organised our shots

Monday 7th November & Wednesday 9th November
We added more cross dissolves in the part where Alannah thinks about the memories as she reads the letter for the second time. This just creates a nice smooth effect for the transition from present to past and back again. We also added the vignette filter to the montages for the past, to add to the handheld-camera effect and to distinguish more the difference in past and present. We have also refined our shots and changed the order slightly, to make our lyrics and visuals relationship stronger. We feel as if our video is complete and will blog it next week.

Monday 14th November
Blogged our final piece

Final Directors Commentary Part Two

Timeline

This timeline will help us to keep track of our progress and help us plan.

Director's Commentary Part Two

Director's Commentary Part 2

Deadlines

Editing Commentary - Wed 14th December
Improving individual evaluations - Monday 12th December
Blog work - Thursday 15th December

To do:

• More director's commentary research (past students' work)
• Evaluation of one of last year's music video
• Evaluation of our own commentary
• Upload: editing of our rough cut diary and final cut diary, analysis into digipaks/mag adverts from past students and real ones, inspiration from Katy Perry's 'Thinking of You' (saved on Word)

Music Video Director's Commentary Script

We want our commentary to look very natural and conversational, so we're going to focus on a few key points we want to make but not directly read from a script.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

• love theme - through song and narrative, 
• inspirations - Enrique - colours, included in story. Adele - black and white. Katy Perry (thinking of you) - in the mirror, sadness in black clothes, memories of bikes and picnics (locations)
• technical elements: fades, vignette filter, handheld camera
• alternative endings
• mag advert: date, title, artist - rose
• digipak - inspired by Roxy Music - letter on back page for track list, rose

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

• all incorporate visual themes of love, love letters and the colours we used
• sensitive, romantic image of artist to attract female target audience (image of perfect lover) 
• rose  

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

• Our audience feedback was very valuable to us 
• initial feedback: helped us be more realistic (1940s theme & rain) 
• rough cut feedback: narrative easy to understand, convincing and adorable performance, needed better lip syncing, more effects, range of shots of Joe, visual+lyrics
• alternative ending
• positive final cut feedback: good use of colours/lighting to highlight emotions, good handheld camera, better visuals+lyrics

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

• Final Cut Express: helped create a productive, romantic music video (effects and filters)
• Photoshop: 3 photographers in group, photoshop good  to use layers in mag advert/digipak, letters + roses, to highlight theme of album
• blogger: helped to organise ideas and inspirations, and to recieve feedback
• dafont.com for fonts
• HD cameras: sharp, realistic footage

Evaluation Questions

1.) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our finalised music video successfully fits the conventions of a typical love song for many reasons. The narrative takes the form of a love sequence and makes references to well known love films e.g 'The Notebook', bike riding scene. We did, however make it evident that it was a music video by establishing the artist and distinguishing the difference between him and his lady. One factor we were happy with was how we managed to link the lyrics with the visuals and music, making it more meaningful and believable through characters, concluding in a very sensitive love piece to attract our intended target audience. Our direct notion has been achieved through our camerawork, as we used POV shots to represent happy montages between the couple. As they are looking directly into the camera it gets the audience comfortably involved in the full extent of the relationship, not as if they are intruding. Again, the editing conforms to the conventions of the theme of love, mainly through our colour scheme. We converted the the lonely, sad times into black and white, whereas the happy montages where we used a warm summers day end colour. It allows the audience to adopt the characters emotions and understand their thoughts and feelings throughout. The only way in which we could have challenged our product would be by subverting from the typical 'happy ending' and followed an alternative ending. An example of this would be killing off the female character at the point of climax where the audience are led to believe she will return to the male character. We considered this as a potential ending, however due to lack of time and props we decided against the idea.

2.) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The combination of our main product and our ancillary texts are very effective in establishing the artist to suit our intended female audience through the romance displayed. All three products follow a similar colour scheme, contrasting between light and dark colours, allowing them to appear iconic to the artist, as opposed to just one of his songs. It is representative of an album makes the artist more recognizable to an audience. We also include an iconic symbol of a rose in both the magazine advertisement and our digipak. Through the close up effect of portraying the artist it successfully attracts our intended target audience as it shows the artist in positive light, therefore presenting as a person that the audience can relate to, as well as his music.

3.) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We learnt a lot of the audience feedback process. Initially the pitch we performed was a success capturing people's attention and generally being thought of as a good idea for a love song. Our only real criticism was the curiosity and concern that it may portrayed more as a film scene than a music video and that we may be pushing boundaries. We bared this in mind and successfully avoided that hurdle as we distinguished the artist very clearly through many different elements, particularly camerawork and editing. After completing the rough cut it was given very positive feedback. The chosen colour scheme and emotive skills by Alannah and myself were regularly commented on. Our only negative feedback was given towards our editing process. We were told to shorten certain shots as they were too uncomfortably for the audience to watch and didn't fit the tempo of the music. We were also told to neaten up the montages with an effect to make it feel more like a home movie. We took this advice into consideration and fixed the changes. The longer shots were cut down, which proved to fit much nicer with the music allowing the video to flow more. We also decided to add a vignette effect to the montage clips which visually made it appear more from the perspective of the character through a video camera and worked beautifully. Overall the feedback we were given through the process was great, allowing us to develop and create a fantastic music video.

4.) How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

There were a range of media technologies we had to use in order to develop our final product. To construct our video we had to use Final Cut, which was good as every member of our group was familiar with the programme from the previous year, therefore allowing us to work faster and more efficiently. To develop our magazine advertisement and digipak we had to use Photoshop. This was another programme we were happy to use as three members of our group were used to using it from their photography work. Again this allowed to us to work faster and develop a better product. the advanced level of the programme's we were using allowed us to be extremely creative with our work, particularly the editing processes. This is because we were able to add effects to our products to make them look more professional than we expected, and only on rare occasion would it slow us down.

Magazine Cover ideas

Our Digipak

Visual Themes

The visual theme amongst our products (Music Video, Magazine Cover and Digipak) is the contrast of colours, interchanging between black and white, and the warm, golden, summers day effect.  Both effects resemble different emotions displayed by the characters with the black and white representing the sad times, and the warm colours taking the form of the characters happy times through montages.

For our digipak the front cover consist of an image revealing the artist. We intend on scheduling a photo-shoot so that we can use professional shots for our cover.

Another one of the main themes of our video is, obviously, 'love'. This is shown in our video through the narrative, and the whole idea of the album will be that it is a romantic, loving album. We want to tastefully convey the idea of love, and are thinking about using images such as love letters, roses and shots of our artist showing emotion to convey this theme. We also are going to use colours such as red/green and black to keep fitting in with this idea of love.

Our Final Music Video!

We feel our music video was a great success and turned out better than we had hoped it would. Our initial ideas did not happen the way we wanted due to timing issues and money, however we were able to successfully adapt our ideas to suit the deadlines and create a moving piece. One of our most successful ideas came by accident; Joe accidentally filmed Alannah in our test shots shakily and it was actually really effective, so we came up with the idea of using handheld cameras, like home videos, in our memory montage. We also thought of an alternative ending, which was that Alannah was running to Joe's house and was dramatically hit by a car, and the letter blew away, so Joe would never know she was going back to him. Unfortunately, we could not film this because of time constraints, and we also felt that this ending would over-dramatize the video and would be too obvious, as it would have included more running shots to build the tension.

Feedback for our rough cut

1. Goodwin: Good narrative and easy to understand; slow paced editing fits in with genre; lyrics+visuals - some lyrics could be highlighted more; good use of invisible camerawork
We are glad we have achieved the effect we wanted; for the video's narrative to be easy to understand and to fit in with the genre.
2. Editing: Pace fits music and editing is very natural; use of black and white works well; fade works well and could use more; doesn't need much more editing to keep natural style.
We're going to look into using effects such as fading and cross dissolves. We don't want to add too many effects as we would like to keep the video natural and not distracting.
3. Camerawork: shots steady with shaky hand held camera being a good contrast; could have a bigger variety of types but not a necessity; overall very good and clever shots.
We feel our shots have a good amount of variety, and any more would distract from the narrative. But we will look into our clips and see if we have any more different shots to use, to see how they'd fit in.
4. Mise en scene: Bikes were a good prop to match summer season and the happiness; costume was related and casual which matched feel of the song; location matched the music as well because the happy points were always outside
We are happy that the audience feel the location and props fit in well, as these were inspirations from the film The Notebook, one of the most romantic films of all time, and we are happy they worked well.
5. Creativity and Performance: very well lip synced, roles very convincing and adorable; story line suited the song and was very clear.
We wanted to convey a deep, meaningful emotion and glad this came across tastefully.

Overall, our feedback was really successful. We have a few more shots to add in and will use the feedback's ideas of using more effects such as fading/dissolving. We will also think about different styles of shots to use for which we'll need the emergency filming day.

Rough Cut

Film Diary

First day of filming (Monday):
So far, our filming has gone really well and mostly as we planned. We have finished the shots of Alannah in her house and her walking/running shots. We also finished the shots of Alannah and Joe's 'memory montage', which was in the country park in Milton. The outside shots were a bit difficult as we had to wait for the public to walk past, but eventually our shots were finished and as we had hoped. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to finish the running shots outside (for when Alannah gets to Joe's house) as the light had gone, and to keep the continuity in our video we could not carry on, but will film these shots at the same time as to get the same light.

Second day of filming (Tuesday):
Today we finished filming all of our shots and we feel it was really successful. We finished the shots of Alannah running outside and they were succesful as the lighting was the same. Alannah also made sure to wear the same outfits, hair etc as to keep the continuity. The shots of Joe also went really well. We had to swap locations a few times in his house to get the right lighting but eventually we decided on the shots and framing, such as him on the sofa and by the window looking out into the distance, and these shots worked really well. We also finished the shots of Alannah and Joe's reunion, and decided the best ending would be the camera slowly moving upwards from Alannah and Joe hugging to the sky. After trying this a few times due to camera shake, the shot was eventually finished and was really effective. It was the perfect ending to our romantic video and we think our shooting was very successful, and hopefully we will not need any emergency filming.

Test Montage

We wanted to test our ideas out, so we used the college field to get an idea of what our framing and shots would be like. We feel the tests went really well, and are a perfect example of what we would like our final footage to be like, but more polished.
We also played around with the colours on Final Cut and, after this, have decided to do the present time in black and white, as black and white tones are quite melancholy, to fit in with the emotions of the song and video at that point in time. The memories and the final reunion will be in colour to represent happier times. The colour we have decided on is a desaturated tone with a gold/pink hue, as these colours represent happiness.

Shot List

Storyboard

Inspiration

Enrique Iglesias - Hero Music Video

Another source of inspiration is the romantic music video for Hero by Enrique Iglesias.

The colour scheme for our music video will be something similar to the hero music video - lots of gold, pink and sepia tones which we will edit into using Colour Correction in Final Cut.
These colours are traditionally used in romantic scenes of movies and music videos, and we feel would fit into our story well and add to the sensitive atmosphere. The colours also relate to a sunset - a traditionally romantic setting. The shots and framing are also very similar to what we hope to use in our music video. The majority of shots are close ups/medium close ups to easily convey the emotions the characters are feeling. The framing usually puts the couple/character in the centre, to make them the main point of focus.

Goodwin's Analysis of 'Hero' by Enrique Iglesias.
1. Genre characteristics: the music video tells a story of a couple in love which is a characteristic of a love song's music video.
2. The lyrics are illustrative, for example when he says 'touch your lips' they kiss in the music video, and when he says 'kiss away the pain' he is kissing her body.
3. The relationship between the music and visuals is illustrative, as there are moments where the villain in the story is playing the piano to match the music.
4. There are many close ups of Enrique in this video, and he is also a character in the story, making his emotions genuine. His direct role in the music video makes him easier to relate to for audiences.
5. There are notions of looking in this music video. Enrique continuously looks at the camera, straight at the audience, again making his emotions more genuine.



Adele - Someone Like You (music video)

Adele's Someone Like You is one of the most famous songs at the moment, well known for addressing pain and love. We'd like our video to convey these strong emotions, and have decided to try the idea of using black and white in our video in the present scenes to convey pain, similar to Adele's music video. Black and white makes the video a lot simpler, highlighting the emotion even more. The dark tones add to the overall atmosphere of the scene. The difference in colours will also highlight the difference in times between the montage of the past memories, and the present - making the video much clearer for our audience. Adele's video also has a slightly blurred edge - we need to experiment with effects to see if this would fit in with our video. Many close ups of Adele show her strong, painful emotions. We would like to follow Alannah on her walk to Joe's house, and hope we can do this as tastefully as Adele's video.

Final Idea

After recieving feedback for our pitch, we have decided to add a more romantic setting and theme to our music video, and slightly change the shots and 'flashbacks' so the video can be more understandable. We have also decided to not use the 1940s theme for the dream/memories as we have too little time to find the right resources to make the idea successful.
The music video will follow our couple as they lead separate lives as well as their reunion, thanks to the letter Joe has written to Alannah.
The video will start with shots of Alannah walking through her house in a modern setting reading a letter, with a melancholy look on her face. The shots will be a variety of medium close ups and close ups, to clearly display the emotion on her face. Joe will then be introduced with medium close ups of him playing his guitar and singing the lyrics of the song. Alannah will be leaning in an extreme close up against her front door, clearly in turmoil about whether or not to go out, interlaced with shots of Joe sitting down, looking anxious and worried. It will then become clear that the two characters and the letter are linked.
Alannah will then leave her house and walk down streets, still reading the letter. She will keep turning back (through a series of long shots/medium close ups) - clearly undecided about whether or not to keep walking.
Memories are then clearly shown as the two are clearly thinking, as Alannah walks down the street and Joe looking out his window. Shots will be shown of the couple in traditionally romantic scenes, such as picnics and riding bikes together. We also have decided to use the idea of a handheld camera as if the two are videoing each other. This is quite a traditionally romantic idea. We intend to edit these shots with a slightly fuzzy quality and pinkish overtones to show it's clearly a dream/flashback.
Alannah then looks at the letter and pauses, looking back between her house and the direction she's walking in, unsure about what to do, and this is the key moment where she decides to definitely go to her lover and she starts running. Shots of her running will still be interlaced with shots of Joe anxiously walking around his house.
In this last section of the video, Joe opens the door and Alannah is there, holding the letter and smiling. The two will then hug and cheer, laughing in the driveway of Joe's house. We were hoping to conclude the video in the rain - a traditional characteristic of the romantic genre - however some of our feedback said it may be hard to do that with the unpredictable weather. We will still try to achieve this last scene in the rain, yet we still feel it will be effective without it, so we will do test shots without the rain.