Goodbye!

 So this is my last EVER post on the blog.. and I just wanted to say a big thank you to the rest of my group for working hard together and producing a great piece of work! I'm very very happy with the way our music video turned out, and extremely relieved that it's all over. Let's just hope all the hard work paid off!

Final progress review blog

How does your A2 blog compare with your AS in terms of detail and use of ICT?

In my AS year of media, my blog was very short and lacked variety. The use of ICT was very minimal and not very detailed. The beginning of this course was quite difficult for me because I hadn't put in as much effort and detail into each individual post. However, bearing that in mind, I believe I had excelled tremendously in the amount of work I've produced, along with the ICT I have used and my frequent blogging.

How effectively does the blog show all aspects of research, planning and production of your Advanced Portfolio?

The research stages of my blog began with very minimal and simple posts, but grew to become longer and more detailed analytical posts. I'm very happy with the research stages of my blog because I feel I have documented and blogged about everything necessary. The planning aspects of the blog also I feel are very rich in detail. The production aspects however, became less detailed and I noticed I was blogging less frequently. This was because I spent all of my time actually doing hands on work like filming or editing, and didn't think to blog about them and how I felt about them. On the other hand, I've blogged about the editing process as well as the filming days etc so I don't think I've missed any important things out.

Where are the gaps in your blogging work?

The gaps in my work are mostly in the production aspect of the blog because I was so busy editing and didn't focus on the blog as much. Other gaps in my work would be closer to the time of actually beginning to work on the video, instead of just researching.

How many individual blogging entries did you produce?

Approximately 80.

What would you change given another opportunity?

I would work harder and take more time on the ancillary side of the project. I would also focus more on the blog by posting everything we did instead of posting the things I thought were necessary. I would also spend more time on each individual post and think of the different ICT I could have used instead, and apply them.

Evaluation question 4

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

 After completing our music videos, we went to a screening to watch our video as well as other A2 music videos at The Screen on the Green in Angel. The audience at the cinema responded very well to our music video, and we caught up with many students afterwards to see what they'd thought.

Below is a video of my friend telling me what she thought of our group's finished video:

I've learned from the audience feedback that the video was very successful for the genre it is in. The audience liked the choice of song, and the locations we chose. One viewer described them as "bright and vibrant" whilst another described the entire video as "well thought out and very precise"

Feedback from ancillary products:

Digipak-
"Clear and eye-catching"
"Artist clearly visible"
"It links to the video because it has the same location"
"The back is really clear and I like the names of the songs you guys chose"



Advertisement-
"I like the picture you used, it's really clear and the artist looks good"
"You could've maybe changed the colour of the fonts"
"I like the placements of the things in the advert, but I feel you could've used more colours to make it stand out more"

The audience feedback made me reflect back on my work, and I realised that I created a very successful piece of work, even though there are some flaws. In hindsight, I think I could've taken more time on my advertisement to bring it up to the same standards of the digipak. However, saying that, I still feel that it was very successful, clear and clearly linked to the main text (music video).

Evaluation Question 3

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

CAMERA EQUIPTMENT:

In order to film our music video, we used the JVC camcorder, and memory cards to store our footage. The camera was very light and allowed us to move freely, as well as capture clear footage. Storing the footage on the memory cards allowed us to transfer them onto the Macs, our own laptops and meant our footage was safe.

BLOGGER:

We used Blogger to document our research, planning and production stages of our music video. The website was fairly easy to use, and allowed us to upload pictures, videos, links and voiceclips.

   
PHOTOSHOP:

We used Photoshop to create our digipaks and magazine advertisement.

FINAL CUT PRO:

THE INTERNET:

ANIMATIC:

Evaluation question 2

 How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisement)?

Evaluation Question 1

digipak

Digipak mockup final

DIGIPAK EDITING

Album track list

With the help of a website that we came across online known as “song name generator” we were able to create a range of tracks for our new artist Marcus green. As this album is to do with relationships we have decided to have the name of each track link with the theme that we are going for which is sort of sad (melancholy).

Here below are the tracks that our CD will consist of:

Digipak mock up

As I've had other work to do, I allocated two days to work on my mock up before I start getting to work on my actual digipak. The images below are from my first day on planning/making my mock up. Here is the task we were set:

PLEASE CLICK THE ABOVE IMAGE TO OPEN PHOTOBUCKET IN ANOTHER TAB.

So far I've started to get a rough idea on what to do for my digipak. As a group, we went out of the college grounds and took some photographs of Mark in front of a wall and near the lake. These were just test shots until we took real photographs of what we wanted.

Song name generator

As a group in today's lesson, we were to finish the things we needed to be done as from now on, it would be only individual work. We spent our time deciding on song names, and when all else failed, we searched online.

We came across this website which supposedly comes up with song names. We started out with a few suggestions, but then it went from the unusual, to the outright crazy!

Above are screengrabs of the website we used to help us with a few of the track listings.

Ancillary- looking at different fonts.

During today's lesson I looked on dafont.com at different styles of fonts we could use for the artist's name and other texts on the digipaks. I wanted something simple, and bold so that it would stand out and be clear on the CD cover or poster ad.

After looking through pages and pages of different types of fonts, I decided to search for specific ones. Whilst looking through the website I wondered what the cover would look like if it had some sort of Marcus Green signature on it to make it stand out and look unique.

I found this particular font on the website. I liked it because it looked as if someone had handwritten it, and would make sense if it looked like Marcus Green's signature.

After looking at a few different fonts, I wanted to see what it would look like if I used a mixture instead of just one type of font. Here, 'Marcus' is in bold capitals whereas, 'Green' is all in lower case. This makes it look more informal but adds a personal touch to the name.

Ancillary research: Function of digipaks

Today in lesson we learnt about digipaks and their functions. Nowadays where people are downloading music illegally online, digipaks can help prevent that because of their added extras. They include extras for consumers, encouraging them to buy the albums or CDs for their bonus extras.

As a class we looked at previous year media students' digipaks- high level ones as well as rubbish ones!

Experiment shots for digipak mockup

planning of our individual mock ups (group discussion)

In today’s lesson we started planning a mock-up for our individual digipaks but before we can actually get started there were a few things that we had to agree on as a group, for example

Color scheme- we wanted the colors of the background to be dark as well as sophisticated, as a result of having a dark background the font color should be sort of grey and silver as this will stand out and grab the audience attention.

In terms of shots for the panels

Front panel- clearly it’s a new artist so we were thinking as a group of a close-up of Marcus green’s face with one side of his face in a brighter contrast, so it looks like someone is shining a light on one side of his face, in a way this can actually emphasis hope.f grey and silver gree on as a gorup

Inside panel-left side should be a long shot of Marcus green probably leaning on a wall or some sort (it’s up to you). The right side of the inside panel should consist of a CD that should be in the same color as background for the whole digipak (which is dark).

Names of the album differs as we all have different tastes of music, we came up with titles like

             1.  Tribulation(which reinforces unhappiness an sadness)

             2.  Man at arms(sort of a more war theme)

             3. Warrior(which reinforces all the pain and suffering that Marcus green has gone through an taken) 

Analysis of digipaks

Awolnations' album over and CD is VERY different from others I have been looking at. However, again it was the colour scheme that attracted me towards it. To find them, I searched up 'artists similar to Alex Clare' and they came up.

Analysis of digipaks

Here is an image of Alex Clare's 'The Lateness of the Hour' album cover and CD design.

The album cover is quite plain, there isn't a picture of the artist Alex Clare but I liked this cover because of the colour scheme. I noticed most of the artists in these genres had simple, two-coloured covers mainly black and white. A plain background with dark text makes it more eye-catching than a busy cover with lots of colours. The cover also looks well organised, aligned and just neat in general.

The actual CD is pretty plain, with the same colour scheme following through. We cannot see any other link in terms of image of anything linking it to the artist except the same font with the artists' name.

Matt Willis' cover is very similar to Maverick Sabre's in the sense that the main image is black and white, and large on the cover- and of the artist. Here, more effects have been used to manipulate the image, as you can see there are more than one images of the artist in this cover. The text is in capitals and white, contrasting against the black, dark background.