The finished product

(Recommended: watch in 720p for better quality)

Reflection on the process of making album art work

The creating of my album cover was a real learning curve as I used Photoshop properly for the first time. This elongated the process of creation but gave me much more of an insight into how to use many of the tools. I have learnt many tricks such as how to download/install fonts, alter an image and turn it into something completely different, use different blending options, effects, gradient backgrounds, use different layers, colour correct/change images etc.

If I could have done anything differently it would have been to watch more tutorials, ask others more questions about shortcuts/effects etc  and perhaps would have done a preliminary task of creating my album art so that I could fiddle around with different effects/brushes/tools and find out more. All of these features could have helped me to speed up the process of creating my album art.

Editing - 6th April 2011

Today I edited and filled in the numerous gaps we had in our video towards the end. We were going to film in our drama studio at school ourselves pretending to be at the gig s we could have used the lighting and 'extra's for the crowd, however the drama dep. is very busy at the moment too and booking a 'perfect' time where all extra's/characters were free was near enough impossible in the time we had and so we used the shots we had already attained at the gig where i filmed Bradley and Michael in the crowd. This shots weren't perfect and so we worried if we could use them but by zooming in to certain shots on final cut and with some clever editing, I managed to edit some useful shots, with discussion and input from Bradley and Michael, into the end which allow the audience to realise that the narrative characters have ended up at the gig. A lot of the footage we used was recorded during other songs and so this was also a struggle in order to make sure certain aspects fitted in and were correct continuity wise. Overall, I am happy with the result of the editing!

The Skints - magazine advert

I really wanted my magazine advert to be an extension of the album art, so that the audience receiving this text will associate the two, however i did want too differentiate both slightly as they are two separate texts. I done this by zooming in on what i believe to be the most eye-catching/interesting part of the album cover (the body/money) I have also changed the colour of the font, in order to make it match the body but kept the same font so that it is instantly recognisable. I have also put all the relevant information that is conventionally found on a magazine album advert such as date of release/name of record label (MLB video) and the main track included on the album. As well as this I have used the same barcode font for the name of the album cover to tie the album in with the advert once more, but i edited this in order for it to stand out once again by making it glow.

I believe this would be effective and appropriate in a music magazine such as Kerrang as i believe the main demographic/target audience will most likely read this magazine and see this advert.

Editing - Monday, 4th March 2011

Today i edited more establishing shots and shots of us in the park playground having fun, as i really want the audience to realise that the characters are having a fun day bunking up in London, which creates that juxtaposition between school (trapped atmosphere) and London/Camden/Playground (freedom) I felt like we had a lot of jump cuts but not a lot of other effects in our music video and felt that it was becoming quite samey, so i sped up the footage of the playground to highlight the playful nature on the see-saw/rocking horse and to link these shots together as a sort of montage. The other members of the group did fear that this would create too much of a 'gimmicky' effect and did not like a rewinded shot of someone walking, that i had added and so i replaced this with another sped up shot of a 'pirate-fight' on a barge on camden lock canal. We all agreed that this worked quite well as it fitted in with the light-hearted 'montage' and was a 'London attraction' which once again reinforced the location.

Editing/Showcase - 31st March 2011

Today, with regards to the feedback from our showcase yesterday, we filmed our narrative characters walking down some stairs to the gig as our teacher mentioned it is somewhat confusing towards the end (of our rough cut of the music video) as the characters from the narrative are not seen a lot in the gig at the end. We did originally film Bradley walking down the stairs in the actual venue, however there was a non-continuity error as he was wearing a hoody that i wear throughout the video. Also at the time of the gig, the other people who act as the narrative characters were not yet established as their roles at the time of the gig and were therefore not with us. We filmed in our drama studio in the dark staircase as we felt this created an appropriate setting and fitted in with what the gig venue could look like. This highlighted the fact that we were in fact in the gig.

Yesterday our group showed the class a rough version of our music video. This allowed us to attain feedback and see things from a fresh perspective so that we could realise the things that may be good or bad about the video such as non-continuity features and narrative errors. Here is the feedback we attained from our teacher...

Our teacher suggested that we include more footage of us ending up at the gig. We did have some shots of this but we thought we may have needed to film in our drama studio and imitate the lights to make sure that this is clear to the audience, however due to a lack of time and paticular members not having free lessons or time after school to do so we have had to make do with the shots we had. We have however edited these successfully and believe that they look effective.

Here are evaluation sheets from other members of the class...

It was clear from these evaluations that our music video seemed to confuse some as the narrative was not finished. As well as this, the sound of this video was incredibly bad quality and so some people may have marked us down on this aspect. Also there were some clips in the gig where I (Louise) could be seen to have been filming but we have edited that out now.

Shot List

For our narrative filming we also created a shot list which allowed us to drag and drop clips into final cut easily and find, to the exact second, the shot we wanted to u