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.