Survey Results

I created a Prezi to show my result of the questionnaire I recently conducted on Survey Monkey.

Twitter Feedback

We recently tweeted Corin Hardy, the music video director that we met at the BFI, our finalised music video for some feedback. We were sceptical for a reply but he did reply to our tweet and had watched our music video. Here is the twitter conversation we shared with him and as you can see he has given us some useful positive feedback.

Audience Feedback

We asked a couple of the year below to have a look at our finished music video and give us some feedback on what they thought of the video as a whole. I was quite surprised to find that a couple of them thought that our protagonist within the video had committed suicide. They said it was because of the following shot:



This is not the representation we had in mind at the start but I am glad that our video has been able to be interpreted in different ways by our audience.

Editing

We have now come to the end of editing our music video as we know it. We have uploaded a full version of the video up to youtube, which can be seen below. I, personally, am very happy with the end result, i feel that it has an overall professional feel to it and shows off the best of our ability.


 

Magazine

We have been looking at different music magazines that fit with the genre we are doing for our music video. As ours is alternative/indie we thought Kerrang! would be a good music magazine to look through, especially for adverts of other bands releasing their CD, for inspiration on our own advertisement.

I chose to look at The Blackout's advertisement as, although not strictly within our genre, they boarder the lines of the alternative style. Looking at this magazine advertisement, you can see that it has followed the basic conventions that an advertisement should. The release date has been included, as has the bands name, the album title and reviews of the album being sold.

When making my own advertisement for our album, i will stick to the conventions of a music video; in the information provided, however i will be aiming to create an advertisement that draws attention to its, as oppose to just flicking past it.

Twitter

We have now created a Twitter page for our band Talk Big Thoughts, in doing this we have widened our publicity and also enabled our selves to an easy access of audience feedback. In doing this we will be able to tweet our final video, or drafts of our music video and ask people to comment on said draft and give any positive or negative feedback in regards. As well as us having access to our audience and their opinion of certain aspects of our band, they are also able to keep updated with the latest things we have been up to.

Audience Research

In our most recent lesson, we have been looking at why we need to conduct our own audience research fro our music videos. We each created our own mind-map of ideas as to why this is a crucial step when developing a music video within A2 media studies.

DigiPak examples

I have created a small prexi, giving more example of CD packs that i quite like and that fit into the genre/style of music that we are using for our music video.

Untitled Prezi on Prezi

Digipak research

Definition of Digipak:
Digipaks are a type of CD packaging made out of card stock or other heavy paper/cardboard material. Digipaks can flip open like a book, or it can have three parts, so that one portion of the packaging opens to the right and one to the left, with the CD in the center portion. Usually, the portion of the digipak that hold the CD is made of plastic like a traditional jewel case CD - the plastic part is simply attached to the paper background.
There are several types of digipaks available, with a range of different number of panels in each. The usual type consists of 4 panels but this can quite easily become either 6 or even 8 panels per pack.

I have a couple examples of them at home, with a four panel and a 6 panel one. The 4 panel Coldplay - Viva la Vida digipak has several signifiers, the first and most obvious being the use of a foreign language in the title of their album. This signifies a cultural variety to the band, and the signified font gives the cover a messy yet artistic feel to it. The dark colours signify gloomy and difficult times, where as the splash of colour signified on the flag creates a juxtaposition of colours.

Another example i have is The Maccabees "Given To The Wild", which is a 6 panel case, larger than the previous digipak. The obvious signifier is the fire across the wild grass, this signifies a sense of wildness to the cover, thus tying in with the album's title of "Given To The Wild". There is also a mysterious object in the centre third of the cover, thus signifying an abstract side to the band, through the randomly placed, unknown object.

Originally a digipak is made of 300gsm card with either a glossy or matt finish. It can have a variety of colours, with different finishing effects such as spot varnish, lamination and embossing. Based on a standard four panel digipak, the dimensions are 139.5mm x 6mm x 125.5mm, and the number of panels within the pack can vary from 4, 6 or 8. This type of packaging is usually for mainstream or leading artists, however more recently it has been used for upcoming artists and alternative/indie styles of music. Which is why this sort of packaging is perfect for our band, as we are produce alternative/indie music. They are also priced at a reasonable rate and are an extremely versatile type of packaging and it can be made to accommodate a booklet of information if wanted by the artist.

Band Brand

I have made a quick Prezi to show our progress on our band name, our digipak and the logo we will be using not only on the digipak but also within our music video.

Talk Big Thoughts on Prezi

Filming Schedule

We have created a little schedule in which we hope to stick to regarding filming for our music video; Filming Schedule

Inspiration

I know that other groups, and perhaps us, want to use silouttes and shadows within their music videos, so i found this little video on youtube that is a perfect example of how a simple music video can be created with the use of effective lighting.

Advert inspiration

I have seen this advert quite a few times, when watching the T.V, and really love the snappy editing techninques it uses that go with the music.The different camera angles also appeal, specifically the ones where it is as if we are that particular untensil. The snappyness is just what we need to have in our music video.

Storyboarding

We've managed to do a bit more storyboarding for our music video, here is what we've got so far:

We have storyboarded around the first minute of the song, so we still have a long way to go, but we are both happy with the progress we've made.

Story boarding progress

Thinking about story boarding last year, we didn't actually do that much of it, which is probably not so much of a good thing. We gathered a basic idea from small story boards about what types of shots we wished to obtain during filming but we didn't actually put anything into a particular chronological order.  This year we need to change this and put more effort into research and planning as oppose to going out one day and having a brief idea of what we hope to film. We need to be more precise in this and story board each different frame we need to gather in order to create a better music video over all.

Looking back at last year, what we did story board did become of use, we used colours to help out setting up the lighting we wanted in each shot and we also used different boxes for different angles of the same shot. Our only main problem of our story boarding last year was the lack of it. But this year we will be doing more and more to obtain a clearer image of what we hope to do in our music video this year.

Filmed Treatment

We presented our Treatment to the rest of the group today and gathered our first piece of audience feed back. The presentation went well and the rest of the group seem to like our main idea for the narrative of our music video.
Here is the filmed presentation of our Treatment:

Possible names

Here is a quick little vlog the two of us produced the other day, describing some names for our band identity!

Treatment

Dead line met! Here is our Treatment in which we will be presenting to the class in a couple of days to see what they think and gain and feedback either positive or negative. I have embeded below both our presentation and our script of what we were saying.

Treatment on Prezi

And here is the script we will be using to present our presentation. Untitled

Research and Planning

Within our music video one of the key symbolic images we hope to attain is that of a Breeze block, and in order for us to include this in our video we need an actual breeze block. So here is a quick video of the two of us trying to find out how much they cost, where we can get them and where....
 

Mood Board

This is our little mood board with a few key words we feel relate greatly to our music video and its genre. The majority of the images are secondary however some of them are primary as i have taken them myself.

Mood Board on Prezi