Feedback from Peers

We have shown the video so far to a few of our peers. We got some really good feedback from all of them and their comments were much appreciated. Some of the things that were commented on are:

• Our lip-synching has been done well and the shots match up with the rhythm of the music.
• The use of a variety of shot types used appropriately was very good.
• The change in the tone and colours between the indoor scenes and the band performance is effective and creates the sort of mood we were looking to create.
• The acting in the video is convincing and in keeping with the tone of the video, especially the mother role.

Mark Criteria for Music Video.

This is the higher level marking criteria which we gave to a group of our peers. They used this as a reference for their evaluation of our work.

The Video So Far.

With the digipack out of the way, we can now begin to focus on our music video again. So far, we have about a minute of footage which comes at the end of the track. This is just due to the amount of film we have managed to shoot so far - we have the end scene completed whereas we are still awaiting more film to  finish the other scenes.
Here is the compressed video so far. For some reason it has come out pixelated, but it's only a rough edit anyway.

Blink 182: Old and New

Here are several of the old aspects of Blink 182 that led to the design of our digipack.

The font we decided on came from Blink 182's 2003 self titled album. We thought it was fitting for the punky nature of the song we chose to make into a video, and fits well with the dark and gritty nature of our photos. We took the idea for black and white and the suburban theme from their recent cover Up All Night, and album Neighborhoods.We also incorporated Blink's smiley logo into the corner on the cover and on the disc on the inside, as well as using it heavily for the webpage.

Lastly, the idea for the inside photo came from Blink's 2002 album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. Because of the black and white theme of our entire project, we put our own spin on the image. We also took the paint splatter look from Blink 182's 2003 album.

Blink 182: Old and New

So I thought I'd do a post demonstrating how many aspects of Blink 182's previous work has come through into our website.

Above is the bands official website compared with our own page. The basic layout is the same, with news on the right and adverts, videos, etc on the left hand side. We have been more creative with our menu thought, incorporating our menu into Blink 182's smiley logo instead of just running it along the top of the page. The tabs running across the top of the news is taken from Blink's website, as is the idea of selling the bands products. We added some cheeky intertextuality by including our CD cover on the page, and took that one stop further by throwing in images of the bands discography, for nostalgia if nothing else. As a final bit of inspiration from Blink's site, we took the fact they use the album cover as part of their design, and include that as side banners on our webpage.

Plans For This Week:

Our plans for this week are to finish the CD cover and website before the deadline on Thursday and also shoot some more footage for us to edit before we break up for Christmas.
On Wednesday, we will ensure that the digipack is as close to finished as possible, although we do need to use one more photo of the entire band that we don't have yet. We plan to do our full band photoshoot on Wednesday afternoon and then upload the best shot to the website on Thursday morning before the deadline.
We will also do a video shoot on Wednesday, given our actors are available, as we had to cancel a shoot on Sunday due to our lead character being absent. Hopefully this next shoot will involve capturing the main bulk of the video so that we have as little to do as possible when we get back after Christmas, as the deadline will then be quite close.
We are planning to book a camera and tripod out over Christmas to get as much footage as possible so we can then focus on editing when we get back.

CD Cover Photographs

I've been away for the past two media lessons as I've had university interviews that unfortunately fell on the days where I was supposed to have media. To make sure that I was still contributing and that I don't leave Ewan to do all the work with the deadline approaching, I did some work regarding photographs for the CD cover.

Last Wednesday, Ewan took the lesson off to do some film work while I was at my interview as there was nothing left for him to do - we had used all the video footage available and we had edited the single band shots and placed them on the CD cover. We needed more content before we could do anything else in class.

To make my contibution to the lesson on Monday that I would miss, I took some photographs for the CD cover on Sunday and then edited them, ready for Ewan to manipulate them and put them onto the CD cover how he wished on Monday. I emailed them to Ewan once I had uploaded them and made a few adjustments on Photoshop.

These are the final images that I sent to Ewan and the best of the bunch I took. I really liked the black and white feel to the images and I think it fits in well to the genre conventions. The only editing I did to these images was that I upped the brightness slightly to make sure that they weren't too dark, yet dark enough to give off this really moody feel and emphasise the tone we want to portray. I also used the unsharp mask tool to make sure that they were entirely in focus and the images were sharp - the lighting conditions were difficult when taking the images and therefore I wanted to make sure that there was no blurring present and that the images were of a good quality.

I particularly liked the first two images shown here and recommended that Ewan use one of those if he agreed with me. He chose the second one. I left him with these images during Monday's lesson and trusted that he would make an excellent CD cover in my absence. I think the final product looks great.

Website in Construction 4

Today I've added a few more bits and bobs to the website. While it's nothing huge, I believe they add more functionality and connectivity to the page. I've added a "like" and "comment" section below each news post, similar to Facebook and I've added tabs for each band members individual news, like the official website has.

Completed Digipack

You are now looking at our completed digipack. We are pleased with the end result, even if it isn't exactly what we had planned. Originally we intended for the cover to have a hand drawn style. We soon realised however, that this wasn't entirely feasible. We didn't know anybody that could draw it the way we wanted it and if we couldn't get it done right we didn't want to have a half baked version instead. So after throwing out the hand drawn idea, we decided to take some photos instead, since Sarah has a more than good enough camera. We decided that it would be better to take the cover image at night, in the rain. The street lamps give the whole thing a nice eerie effect and the original design had a street lamp. The black and white also compliments our website, while the suburban setting compliments our video and the theme of Blink 182's recent album; Neighborhoods. Overall, we are pleased with the results.

CD Inside Completed

This is the completed inside of our digipack. We've used a band image similar to the inside image of Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, and we have continued the paint splatter motif seen on our website.

Band Photographs 2

As mentioned before, I have now taken the 3rd and final band shot. We have now decided that rather than finding a place for this on the website, where there will be a full band photograph, we will place it on the inside of the CD cover (much alike the one from which we took inspiration).
Here is the photograph before manipulation:

... and after:

After I had completed the editing process of this image, I then took all three images and combined them onto one final image which will be used on the CD cover:

I think the photographs look professional and effective and fit in nicely to the tone and theme of our song, as well as our digipack.

CD Inside in Construction

This is what we have so far for the inside booklet. I wanted to make the tracklisting inside the logo to mirror what we've done on the webiste. I also included the CD logo and record company logo again, just because that's what you see on most CD discs.

CD Cover in Construction

This is our CD cover so far. We have yet to take the images we need, so I began work on the fonts and general layout. I thought it would be a nice touch to include things like the Record Label logo and a parental advisory warning, as well as the mandatory bar code. We plan to get the photos for the digipak this Sunday.

Band Photographs.

On Saturday, we took some photographs of two of our band members (one was absent) for the website design - I've edited these images in such a way that is inspired by a previous Blink-182 photo shoot. I thought the colour scheme apparent in our photos would suit our website and CD cover and the general tone better than the multi-coloured backgrounds used in the original, which matched the colour scheme of that album.
Here is an image of the previous photo shoot, which was part of the lyric book/digipack for the album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (2001):

Here are the two images I chose to edit in their original form:

... and then after manipulation on photoshop:

To manipulate these images, I first of all took the original images and ensured that the contrast levels were correct and therefore used the "levels" tool on photoshop to do this. I then used the "unsharp mask" tool to sharpen the images and make sure there was no digital blur. Once this was done, I took the "magnetic lasso" tool and removed the background from the images, making it white. To create the faded background, I used the "gradient" tool, with differing levels of intensity to give the two images slightly different tones. 

I will perform the same processes when editing the final image of the band members. Once I've taken the images for the last member of the band, I will join these images together as seen in the photo shoot that inspired this idea. We will then find a place for this image on our website.

Website in Construction 3

This is what the website currently looks like. Instead of pink paint blotches, we have changed them to blacks and greys to better suit the whole theme. We have also added in a discography section, which we consider to be a nice touch.

Website in construction 2

So I had the idea to add something to the white background to add a little more visual flair, and thought a kind of paint splodge effect would look nice. This is an idea inspired from the cover of Blink 182's fifth studio album, so it's inkeeping with the conventions of their image.