MG: Advert - Final

This is my final print advert for our music video:

• I edited the background again as the handprint on fire didn't link to the other print products in our group. However, I added another background to give it a slightly darker shade as I felt this looked more professional.
• I moved the text around and ensured that there was a hierachy of text in order to target the most important information to our audience successfully.
• I then added the 'Hospital Records' logo as this is a well known record label and will therefore suggest how the song may sound and will appeal to that specific audience.

I have followed quite a few conventions of real media products of this genre:

• Conventional drum and bass music adverts use big, bold fonts, usually in capitals, stating the artist, the song title and any other relevant information. Therefore I have used the font 'Monark Black' to present the information about our song. This is also the font that 'Hospital Records' use, giving reference to the record label.
• The layout of my advert is very conventional; it is all aligned to the centre of the page in order to stand out to our audience instantly which is a common technique used in adverts of this genre.
• The images and backgrounds I have used are also very conventional in the way that they are big and bold and will appeal to our target audience.

My advert links to our other print products (the digipak and the other advert) in several ways:

• They all use the same font in order to give a sense of continuity between them.
• There is a variety of bright colours used in all of them to connect them all in some way. This makes them all more eye-catching for our audience.
• All print products will also include the 'Hospital Records' logo, again giving reference to the record label.

My advert links to our actual music video in similar ways:

• The same font will again be used to introduce the video, presenting more continuity.
• Bright colours are the main focus of our video and are also incorporated into my advert, presenting the relation between the two.

Group: Editing Progress 4

• We are now in the process of adding the final pieces of night time footage to fill in the part of the video and adding finishing touches such as adding text at the beginning and the end of the piece. We will also need to alter the luminocity and saturation before exporting. However due to the vast amount of clips we have in the project and limited space, it makes editing very hard because Premiere Elements is running so slowly, we are trying to combat this. We have showed the rough cut to the rest of the class who are very impressed with what we have done and say it was exactly what they envisioned after listening to the pitch - which is a positive sign.  

• We decided to shoot at night for the breakdown in the song because it adds to diversity and makes the video more interesting. It also displays a theme/pattern to the footage rather than literally having completely random shots. Other students are saying our music video is colorful and exciting which is exactly what we set out to accomplish. 

AH: Print Development 1

• To begin my print production i obtained an amazing scenic picture and decided it would be the background of my advert. It is disjunctive to the song which i am advertising as it looks relaxing and tranquil, whereas the song is much the opposite.
• This disjuncture grabs the attention of audiences not only because of the magnificent picture but the fact that there is a drum and bass record labels logo placed upon it.
• I used the satin effect to darken the image and give it a less innocent appearance. After doing this it was clear that the brightness of the image was very much from the centre. This technique means that audiences are drawn to the centre of the image and intrigued to find out what the advert is for.
• The line under the Hospital Records logo seperates it from the rest of the advert and is a strong convention in the advertisements produced by Hospital Records. Once i created the line i realised the ends were sharp 90 degree angles, i changed this very simply; by using the rubber tool and my steady hand i curved the edges to give it a softer appearance.

MG: Print Development 3

This is further development on the advert for our music video.

• I have added more text, using the website and copy and paste, in order to give more information. I decided to make the outline of 'Hot Fuzz' in the colour red to make it stand out a lot more than the other words as this is the name of the song and the most important part of the advert. I also decided not to outline the 'Out Now' and 'www.hospitalrecords.co.uk' as I feel it would be too much and the contrast between the white and the black is already enough for it to stand out.
• I have set the text out in a conventional way with the artist at the top, the song title in the centre and when it's released at the bottom.
• I added another background and layered it underneath the background I already had. I lowered the opacity of the previous background in order for the new background to come through. The way the picture is of a handprint on fire emphasizes the 'hot' part of the song title and this should hopefully come across to our audience.

MG: Print Development 2

Above is a screenshot of early stage in my print development. I used several techniques to achieve this and will continue to work on top of what I have so far to improve it.

• Firstly I found a suitable background and made that my first layer. I then got a picture of what almost looks like grass and removed the background from it using the magic wand tool. I then halved the picture using the rectangluar marquee tool and then cut and paste and placed the top half at the bottom of the advert and the bottom half at the top of the advert to create an effective header and footer.
• I then added text. However, rather than using the text tool (due to the fact that Adobe Photoshop did not have the font I needed), I found the text on a website and wrote out the words I wanted and then copied and pasted it into photoshop as a picture. I then used the transform tool whilst holding down shift in order to keep the correct shape of the text but to change the size to give a bit of variety in the advert.
• The text then didn't stand out very much so I decided to use the brush tool to create a blurry outline of each letter to ensure the poster is eye-catching and visually exciting.

DW: Digipak Development 3

After completing the front cover of the digipak, i used the same visual style and font to create the tracklisting/back cover. I started by using an original image of a DJ at the Hospital Records "Hospitality" event in London in 2011. I used the curves and levels tool to adjust the colour and texture of the image to make it fit with the same style of the front cover. I also resized it so that it fitted the square shape of the pack and added a barcode to conform to print conventions.  


After this i used the Monark Black text which I used on the front cover (also the text used heavily by Hospital Records). Because I used the purple/pink cover to give the background colour in front cover I wanted to replicate this in the tracklist, I picked the colour and used the colour overlay tool to colour all the track text. 

 I think this colour fits the theme of the digipak as well as making the text stand out. All i need to do now to complete this part of the cover is to add information or "fine print" along the bottom of the cover, left of the barcode e.g. Copyright information and the hospital records web address so that the digipak conforms to the typical conventions of an official digipak.  

DW: Digipak Development 2

The front cover of the digipak is now complete, I tried and tested many backgrounds and images etc. and eventually landed on one. I also used the adjusment features to bring out colours e.g. using the "curves" tool as well as altering contrast and opacity in order to give me the appropriate blend of colours and textures I wanted. However because it is an album the text at the top will need to be changed to simply "DANNY BYRD HOT FUZZ"

I then started to create the back cover of the digipak (the tracklisting) using similar imagery and the Hospital records text, i used the curves adjusment to get the opacity, contrast and colours right and in the same theme as the front cover and this piece of print is now in progress.

 

DW: Digipak Draft

This was my cover draft for the digipak cover. Altough it is extremely rough and poorly done you can at least see the ideas for the imagery as well as where the text will be located. Already I have had second thoughts about the central image whether it will be too dull and may need more going on in it so i can develop this in Photoshop and track my progress in digipak development posts.

Group: Editing Progress 3

• We have come to a wall in the editing process of our track. This is because we have reached the break down section of the song. We haven't run out of footage, it just that unfortunately the footage we already have doesn't suit the section.
• Therefore there is another shoot sceduled where we will film footage purposely for that section.
• However from the previous progress update we have obviously edited up untill this point.
• The shots we have put here are in time with a much faster pace beat then before.

Group: Editing Progress 2

• Here we have worked on the second drop of the song.
• In the build up to the drop the lyrics "1,2,1,2,3" are played. When hearing this on the song we have used the strobe effect to cause a flash on screen in time with the lyrics.
• After each flash the shot changes to a different scenic clip. 
• The difficulties we encountered when editing this part of the song is making sure the flash is in time with the lyrics. The way we overcame this was by zooming in on the timeline and expanding the audio; this allowed us to see where the lyric was exactly by the spike in the audio wave. 

Group: Concept Development 16/11/12

• We have arranged another shoot day next week to get more footage for the breakdown part of our music video.
• We will be going to Leake Street in London on Tuesday 20th November at about 4 o'clock when it starts to get darker to get some good shots in the dark and to get some shots of bright city lights.
• We hope this will work well with the rest of the video and fill up the missing shots that we need for this particular part of the song.

Group: Animatic

This our our animatic for our music video. Because our video relies heavily on so many different shots and diversity, it was not possible to draw all of these - we would have literally hundreds of drawings. The cutting rate in the real video will also be faster and with a much wider variety of shots but we could only draw and compile so many otherwise it would take too long.

MG: Concept Development 15/11/12

• After editing together a large amount of our shots, we have realised how fast our cutting rate is and how many shots we actually have. There is a possibility that we could come to the end of our footage soon so we are planning on having another shoot.
• We will film next week in the evening so it's dark with fireworks and flares like we had planned in the first place. This will give us some more abstract shots and more footage to edit together.

MG: Draft of Advert

• The advert I will be creating will be made on Adobe Photoshop where I can edit images and text together to create a professional-looking advert. 
• Above is an extremely brief draft of the layout of the design of my advert. I have decided on quite a conventional layout as I feel it is most appropriate for this genre having analysed an existing music video advert previously. 
• The titles will be in capitals in bold text in order to stand out the the target audience and also to give them the appropriate information about the track. 
• In the centre will be an eye-catching image which will enforce the name of the track and will fit in with the drum and bass genre.
• For the background, I will use a layering technique in order to achieve an unique texture behind the text and images to make it look even more professional. 

DW: Digipak development

• The digipak and poster are also in production, this image shows the current stage of the digipak front cover, with the official Hospital Records text and logo, the image below that shows the earlier stages of this design. To manipulate every picture into the required place, style and shape etc. I used a range of techniques. For example the magic wand tool helped me a lot, and the "levels" and other feautures under the adjustments tab were also important to give me the desired colours and textures. 

This image shows the digipak cover in the earlier stages, we liked the fact that the hospital record logo was on fire as we felt it related to the song - HOT fuzz. Photoshop also allowed us to try different images, colours and ideas easily via the use of layers which made the process more time effective and also made it easier to choose suitable visuals. The fire coming out of the central image spreading to the outside of the record was originally a picture of a sun. I cut and erased the harsh edges of the picture to make it more natural, I then altered the opacity to make it blend more, as well as using the blend and smudge tools to blend it into the record further. Lastly I altered the colour curves to make it more subtle and fitting. 



Group: Editing Progress

• So far we had only cut and moved all our shots together to see what order we wanted them to go in. We haven't added any effects or titles yet.
• Today we edited the lead to the main drop of our song.
• As you can see we have cut a selection of our shots and put them into a montage with a fast pace cutting rate to go with the progressive beat of the song.
• After todays lesson we are feeling extremely positive about the progression of our music video because our footage looks professional and compliments the song.

Group: Evaluation of Shoots

On Tuesday 30th October 2012, Alex and Dan went to South Bank and Camden in London for our first shoot. They went to the skate park and filmed several people performing tricks on their scooters, bikes and skateboards. They also got some shots of street dance performers and urban scenery. After watching these shots back on the computer, we have realised how successful these shots are and we have achieved exactly what we wanted to: a wide range of short interesting shots of different angles and movement. The only problem that there was, was the fact that they did not ask members of the public to look directly down the camera in order for us to have some 'people' shots. However, we took this into consideration for our next shoot that we had planned in Brighton.

On Friday 2nd November, we went to Brighton for our second shoot. All three of us attended and went visited several areas of the city to get as many shots as possible. Firstly we filmed Alex rollerblading down the road along the seafront, then we filmed scenery and people from our walk to Churchill Square, to Brighton Train Station and to The Lanes. We have achieved an even wider range of interesting shots and this time we had the confidence to ask members of the public if we could film them for our video, increasing the amount of 'life' shots. We also had more equipment when we went to Brighton: the track and the steady cam, meaning we could get more professional shots. However, we had a few problems with the track as it was not as long as we wanted it to be.