More public feedback

I've once again reviewed the feedback that we received on Tumblr from our video. We got some positive thoughts back:

Public Feedback

After posting a link to our video on the blogging website Tumblr, we received some feedback from the public about the strengths and weaknesses of the music video. We received two individual 'likes' on the video and were also given an in depth response from one person, to which we replied with our thoughts and answered his questions.

Here you can see his response. We very much appreciated his thoughts and he later commented on Tumblr that he did really like the video and hoped it went well for us both, which we thought was nice of him.
I think this shows that we have taken into consideration what the public would expect from a Blink-182 video and have tried to create something that we think would appeal to fans of the band.

Public opinions on the video so far.

I decided that as a way of getting a wider, objective and more varied opinion of our music video so far, that I would share a link to our video on my personal blog on the website Tumblr.

I will post any responses we get at a later date. Hopefully this will enable us to get some good, honest feedback from the general public and fans of the band.

Final Music Video 1

This is the first full edit of our music video. The quality is bad due to compression. Oh well.

Editing Update

In today's lesson, we made some final adjustments to our music video, ready to show Mel on Monday so she can give us feedback. We changed some of the lip-synching so it was more accurate and added in some more performance shots to break up the shots of vocal performance.
We also thought that the narrative shots of our main character outside were too sunny for the sort of feel we're going for. Obviously, the weather is something we can't change, so we decided to look into some effects to change the mood and tone of these shots. We found one that adjusted the colours and midtones of  the shots, so used this to create a more gritty feel. We adjusted the saturation levels and increased the darkness slightly, which helps to remove the sunny glare you initially got from our narrative shots. I think it looks much better because of it.

Filming and Editing update

Over the past week, we've been busy trying to get all of the filming we needed out of the way so that we could focus on editing over the next couple of weeks, before the deadline. On Sunday, we finished filming all of the narrative footage that we needed to complete our music video. It went pretty well, with very few glitches and I think the footage we captured was all very usable. We have decided that next weekend, if we have the time, we are going to re-shoot some footage to make sure that all of the shots we have are of a very good standard.
Over the past two days, both in lesson and in free time we have been editing our music video, to the point where today, I have finished putting all of it together. No doubt, there will be a few things that may need changing when our teacher looks at our work, but overall we're very happy with what we have so far. We hope that now we have finished a first edit, we will have plenty of time to try out effects and really perfect what may need tweaking. I will upload a rough version of the music video soon.

After Midnight: The new blink-182 video.

I thought it would be relevant to look into the new video by blink-182 to look at the current direction they are going in and see how it relates to our own music video from the same album.
After Midnight is a slower, more ballad like song and therefore the pace is quite different to ours. However, the split of narrative and performance is quite similar and their use of a grungey, desolate and isolated environment for the setting of their performance is similar to the approach we were going for, which I think shows our knowledge of the genre and the band themselves.
I think that the performance side to this video shows some classic blink-182 features. We captured the same sort of characteristics in our band members that are reflected in blink-182 themselves, such as their interaction with the camera and their performance styles. There is very little direct eye contact and they don't seem to have any awareness that the camera is there, which is something that we have also included in our performance.
Another thing that I feel we have related to the band is the se of costume and mise-en-scene. The band have a very distinctive image that we have tried to mirror in our actors:

Feedback from Mel

After having our first review with Mel, she gave us the following feedback:

• Adjust the framing of some of the performance shots. There is a particular close up of our frontman which is a bit off.
• Make more clear the relationship between Rory and the band. The intention is that the band is essentially apathetic towards him, but this could be made clearer.
• Use more shots of the drums. The song is very driven by drumming, because Travis Barker is God. For this reason we need to put more emphasis on the heavier drum rolls and such.
• Get the frontman to look down the lens more often.

That's pretty much it.

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.