Digi Pack creating

I recently have been working on the digi pack for our artist Jo Birchall, after discussing what we thought would be appropriate to match her star image we wanted to have a fun 60's retro look to our digipack, we therefore used a black and white theme with baby pink.

I started off trying to use one of our actresses as our back cover but we decided it looked too edgy for Jo's star image.

We therefore grabbed an image of Jo and used her instead, keeping the black and white theme.

Timelapse of Shoot day

Jo Birchall- Twitter.

Heres a picture of a tweet Jo tweeted on the day of our shootday!

Making of Video

This is a film we made on our shootday to capture what we did all day, we included a timelapse in it, and edited it on Final Cut Pro to put it all together

Feedback

When asking what the strengths of our rough cut were, the feedback we got was:

• The variety of shots
• The continuity of the editing flowed well
• It makes sense
• The shots were good quality

When asked what the weaknesses were:

• More editing needs to be done on the narrative
• The lighting is a bit low
• The attic scene looked quite dark
• wasn't always cut on the beat

What meanings did they gain from watching the video:

• Love story
• Teenage love
• Past
• Memorys

Suggestions:

• use more of the narrative to strengthen the story
• more narrative
• cleaner cuts
• more performance

When encoding our video ie: making our storyboard we encoded certain messages and themes to our narrative, ie: a teenage lovestory. from the feedback we recieved we can see our audience's easily decoded these messages within our video.

Feedback form for roughcut of our video

Feedback Form

Something to say- Jo Birchall

Name:

Age:

 

1. What Strengths can you identify within our video

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Are there any weaknesses you can see within our video

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. What do you think is the meaning of our video, do you get any specific readings?

 

 

 

 

 

4. Do you have any suggestions or changes for our video

 

 

 

 

5. Any other feedback?

 

 

 

 

 

Evaluating the progress of the rough cut

We have now begun editing our rough cut of our music video, we're using Mac computers to edit on the programme final cut pro. The strengths of our product so far have definitely been the performance element of our music video. The advantage of having a real artist singing along to our own track made it so much easier to sync when it came to editing and also because she is a professional our shots match up niceley and there aren't any big problems with continuity. I would say another strength of the product so far, is the cuts are clean and slick and there aren't any moments where they appear obvious or out of place. The weaknesses of our product would be the fact that we haven't got all the shots we wanted. for example we are yet to do our pick up shoot which would include filming our main narrative therefore our music video is mainly performance based at the present, this is definitely a weakness as i feel we dont have enough material to make it interesting.
Issues that have come up in the editing process is definitely lack of care as to what appeared in the shot on the day of our shoot meaning we had to get rid of a lot of our shots, unfortunatly we lacked to realise that some shots are a little shaky and out of focus, however because they are focus pulled we resolved this issue by cutting around them and still managed to use a portion of the tracking shots. Another issue that occured was unfortunatley you can see the tracks in one of the shots we again resolved this by cutting where the tracks come into shot, although this did resolve the issue it is a shame as the shot was a good one.
Our project has definitely changed from our original plans, mainly due to the fact we didnt have enough time to film the main part of our narrative, therefore we have had to be creative and work round the story board and almost start from scratch, we had to start by only using performance element and then cut in the little narrative material we did have. We are going to have to put in some post production work as we did work with green screen however not much else needs to be fixed which is a positive for us, we are going to work on putting a Paris skyline in the background.

These are some screenshots of our timeline of our rough cut, we have learnt how to sync the music with the lip sync using markers and blade tools, we have learnt that to make it easier for ourselves its good to have the same shot on the same timeline, so we can stretch and cut where nesscary, also by layering our shots we can go back to a certain camera angle at a different point if theres a shot we need just by, using blade tool and stretching out. I have learnt alot about the editing process and feel much more confident with using the different tools.

shoot day evalutation

The day before our shoot day I went to the studio to look at the set build and worked through my props list with my group to discuss what needed to be put where, we thought the rooftop for our attic was too small, however we worked round it by placing our artist on a stool. We began to move our props into the attic set to make it look authentic and also thought about what costumes we needed and set them up on a hanger on the side of our set. On the morning of our shoot day I woke up excited for the process of our first music video but also nervous of the outcome, I went through a final list of shots and thought about what we wanted to achieve. When arriving to set, I felt prepared however we had a lot of teching to do with lighting, because we didn’t have access to the lighting equipment the day before, although this set us back an hour or two our artist was stuck in traffic so we had time to fill to make sure everything was set up ready for her arrival. The studio looked professional with the lighting and the smoke machine to give the attic an authentic dusty look, everything looked very realistic and we had our cameras set up ready to film. Because we had a professional artist I took the role of chaperoning on the day, we gave tom the role of camera man and Ivan directing and playback, however we all took turns trying each role evenly to gain an experience of all aspects of filming. I therefore took an active role in everything.

Personally I think the role I did well was the filming and chaperoning, I made sure the artist was happy and made sure she knew what was going on at all times, I was also picked to do some tricky tracking shots, which although I found difficult I enjoyed. The problems we had on set involved timing, the hair and makeup for our artist took way too long and unfortunately we weren’t able to capture all the shots we wanted due to the time difficulties however we got round the problem by organising pick up shoots, another problem we had was our actor was unavailable for our pick up shoots, we therefore had to cast tom in our shoot, leaving me and Ivan to shoot the music video, we worked together and got it done, doubling up on roles.

The most successful part of the shoot was definitely the performance element, because our artist was a professional the lip sync worked really well and was easy to edit in the end. The part I wish had gone better was definitely the second performance element, because we were rushed for time, we didn’t get all the shots we wanted however we still gained enough material to produce a good end product. However the second performance element is definitely the part I’m most looking forward to editing as the shots we did obtain worked really well and created some cool effects with the projection overlapping on our artist.

Our production group worked so well together helping each other on the day we were able to give advice to one another and use our skills to make the best video possible, at one point when doing tracking shots all three of us had to use the camera, and this was a good example of how we worked as a team to get the best shots possible. If there is one lesson I learnt from our shoot day is that you need to prepare for time issues, and definitely to be more organised when it comes to hiring makeup artists as this did set us back.

Potential album cover

This is Nancy Sinatra's album cover. I think that this is the most suitable album cover that i've found because it's very 60's and is easy to recreate with Jo.

 

Digi Pack ideas

Here are some of the album covers that we think have the same feel as the album cover we are going to make:

 

 

 

 

 

 

In terms of the website we are going to make for Jo, we looked at other artists websites for inspiration. Here are a few of the websites we looked at:

 

 

 

Storyboard Animatic

Evaluation of story board

Storyboards, are a way in which you can estimate a shot by shot sketch of how your music video is going to look. They help in planning because you set down the shots in order so you can see if you have too many or not enough footage for the song, it helps in that it makes you think about what each shot is going to look like and what lighting and edit transition you’re going to use. In terms of planning having a storyboard will ensure we get all the shots we want on the day of our shoot and help us see how we’re going to edit it aswell.

The process of creating a story board includes many aspects, we used our timelines to gather all the shots together and they shot by shot we sketched the shots out.

 

 

 

we then had to film them shot by shot, and use that footage to cut the animatic using final cut pro, and we had to cut it to our artists song. We spent a long time in the editing suite making sure the shots were cut exactly on the beat, to do this we put markers in place in time to each beat in order to make the animatic flow better. After placing all the shots down we had to start playing with certain shots and deciding which ones would be longer than  beat and which ones would be shorter, we decided to use the fast beats to do a quick cut. And then had to spend a long time making sure the music fit the shots.

We decided to use the shots of Jo and the shots of the boy and girl to establish the overall concept for our film. Key moments include the tree climbing and the revealing of the romantic roof terrace and of course the kiss at the end between the two actors in order to represent the idea of a conventional love story.

 

 

 

We received feedback on our animatic and discovered that the strengths of it is that its clear and easy to follow, its edited well and our audience understood the concept well. Our weaknesses include the clarity of the performance element and not having enough of it we will therefore make sure we work on that in the final project. It was useful to have feedback from the class as it gave us a nonbiased opinion of our story board, and gave us a chance to see if people who haven’t created it can still see the clear connections and concept. We went through the fact that its going to be quite difficult to get a “Vespa” on the day of the shoot, and therefore we have decided to leave this bit out and perhaps use push bikes instead to create the concept of a journey to the roof terrace. We will definitely be keeping the park and terrace scenes however we have decided to use one handheld camera not two for the actors to film each other with. We think the roof terrace is key to our French 60’s romantic concept and the projector at the beginning will also introduce this idea.

Our star image for Jo would be a young attractive female looking for love, her image is easy going and feminine, and we feel we’ve kept this idea, in the performance element. Our target audience would be 16-25 year old girls, and we’ve attracted this kind of audience by keeping the couple as young lovers rather than using Jo as the female actor. I think we will keep our target audience by using the cliché romantic story line and the feminine costumes, and the attractive male actor which will attract a female audience, we feel Jo is relatable and our narrative is also something girls will watch and be able to understand.

The lessons I have learnt during this process is that organisation is key, without the organisation we wouldn’t have met our deadlines. I also found editing quite hard and therefore learnt some valuable lessons in the editing suite which will help me when cutting our final product.

Set designs

We recieved feedback on our Set designs and decided that the raised window on the roof terrace would make it look more realistic and we would have a corner balcony, we decided we needed lots of clutter to make the attic work for Jo's singing.

Email to Jo Birchal's Record company

To Polydor

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:

Something to say- Jo Birchall

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

Isabella Hardie, Ivan Gower, Tom Gass
Hurtwood House School

Actors

Our male actor Joel Hambry, will be dressed in 60's type clothes with 60's hair, and will be playing the boyfriend in our music video

Ollie Baynham is our Female actress we want to give her an Edie Sedgwick look and she will be Joel's grlfriend in our piece.

Storyboard- Jo Birchall- Something to say