Improvements made to digipak

In between the creation of our music video I have made significant improvements to my digipak and magazine advert. One real positive was that all the pictures that we took were usable which meant we didn't have to go out again and take some more. I feel I have made a considerable amount of progress on my first draft which looked like this:

For example, I coloured the background of the CD panels, coloured the spines, created two of my own spines and got rid of a lot of text to make it simpler to read and understand.

Here are some more examples of past drafts for my digipak and some of the progress I have made:

Day and night theme

As our music video is called "Day n' Nite" we decided early on in the planning stage that we wanted to combines shots in daytime and night time. However, one part of the feedback for our final draft was that everytime the artist said "day n nite" in the song we could transition to a night shot. This was a slight issue as we hadn't filmed the scenes with this in mind so we would have had to re-film everything which wouldn't have been possible considering the lack of time we had at this point. Instead, we used some extra shots such as ones where King J is simply dancing or acting to the camera. We also included a lot of shots of him admiring the settings of the video as one common theme is his rise to the top and where he was "Born n Bred" which is the album name.

Final music video- Day N Nite

Feedback sheets for final edit

Production schedule for the re-filming of our music video

Tuesday 3rd January- 2 hour filming session during lesson (Thamesmead- hill shots)

Wednesday 18th January- 2-3 hour filming session after school (Greenwich- night shots)

Tuesday 24th January- 2 hour filming session during lesson (Welling- final shots)

These 3 dates were all the shoots we did after our first draft in order to improve our video. On all of these shoots we used our director's camera with no other equipment.

Production Log Entry 12

We have now finished the editing of our final music video. Ghanshyam edited the video during class whilst the rest of our group were there available for opinions and any other way Ghanshyam needed us to help. We are very happy with how it looks and the editing that Ghanshyam has done.

Final video feedback

Today in class we screened our final music video to our class. There will be slight tweaks in terms of the editing but this edit will be largely the final piece. The feedback was overly positive. Many people thought this edit was a lot better than the first edit.

One common theme in our feedback was good cinematography. A lot of the feedback said that the use of camera angles and different types of shots were effective.

Another positive were our settings. Many people thought the additional settings of Greenwich and the hill in Thamesmead were much more effective than some of the settings we had in the first draft.

One thing that a lot of people felt we could tweak and work on was some of the lip syncing with the lyrics. We noticed this ourselves just before we screened the edit to our class and will work on fixing that. Another improvement was some of the night time shots being grainy. This is purely because of the focus of the camera at night time, so to get around this we will look into colour correction in editing. Finally, the narrative of our video was slightly unclear to some people.

Overall, the improvements that people suggested are do-able and there were a lot of positives to take away from the screening.

Programs used during the creation of our project

These are the programs that we as a group used to aid us with the creation of our music video and digipaks. We used each one for different reasons and at different stages of our project. Blogger for example was used to document every stage of our project. YouTube was used as a means of researching into existing music videos and digipaks to aid us with the creation of our own. Dafont was used to download different fonts for our digipaks and the creation of our artist logo. Photoshop was used to put all of our photos from our photoshoot together and to create our digipak. Finally, Final Cut Pro was used to create the actual music video.
  

Production Log Entry 11

Today we filmed one final shot. This consisted of a close up of the girl that King J was shown looking at in the party scene. This girl represents the girl that King J wants and is a central character behind the romantic sub-plot of our music video. This shot was very simple and was simply a quick pan close up of her face. We done this during our media lesson and shot it so that there was a back drop of a brick wall so as to not confuse anyone.

Problems we encountered with this project

During the production of our music video we have encountered a few problems and setbacks. These have made the process more challenging, yet each team we have found solutions and ways to get around it.

One of our first problems was that some of the original shots were shaky and unsteady. This was especially apparent in scenes where the camera was following King J as he moved about. To fix this, we shot a lot of still shots with minimal movement of the camera. We also used dollys, tripods and tracks where possible, although a lot of our shots were handheld.

Another common problem throughout this project was scheduling times for filming and editing. As nearly all of our group work outside of school we had issues with finding time to film. To counteract this, we used most of our media lessons during school to go out and film what we needed, then come back and edit when it was possible to do so. In the future, a proper schedule and production log where we write down dates and times to film should be used.

We also struggled with the narrative of the video. A lot of people were confused with the narrative when we showed our first edit and it is something we have tried to work on. We originally wanted the video to show how King J has transitioned from a life of violence and gang troubles to money and fame. We originally included a scene with his former gang, however the feedback suggested that it was unclear that this was the gang and that the setting made it too much like a grime video. To get around this, we included a lot of shots of nice buildings and scenery and even shots on top of a hill overlooking the city. This particular setting suggested that King J felt on top of the world with his new found fame.

Production Log Entry 10

Over the last few weeks our group has re-filmed nearly the whole of our music video in order to meet the deadline of this week for the completion of the final edit. We have began to edit together the final product and are very close to completing it. Ghanshyam has been our editor and will complete the edit, with the rest of our group giving feedback and advice where needed. We feel confident that the shots we have re-filmed look better than the original ones did on our first draft and we feel the video as a whole looks a lot better.

Production Log Entry 9

Today our group finished re-filming our music video. We only had one shot left to do which was roughly a 20 second long take of the "hold the phone" section to our song. The reason why we had to re-film this bit was because we scrapped the gang scenes from our first draft. Also, in the first draft, the camera panned up slightly too early to show off the name of the shop that King J had just come out of. This was because I couldn't hear the song as it was busy and we were near a main road where lots of cars were going past. This meant I couldn't keep in time with the song and didn't know exactly when to start tilting the camera. The shot came out good in the end. We made Jacob stand in front of some garage doors of a set of nice looking flats so that it looked high end and showed off how far he has come since his days of being in a gang.