Evaluation

 

Here is my evaluation on my media productions. I have presented my evaluation on a powerpoint. 

 

 

 

Completed Website

After doing some the last couple of pages and making some final edits, this is the official website for Ed Sheeran:
http://scondysodimu.wix.com/edsheeranofficial

Completed Digipack

This is my second Ancilary task.  A digipack including a front cover, inside page and back cover for the official Ed Sheeran single, Grade 8:

Front cover



Inside cover

Back cover

Nearly, but not quite...The Digipack

I am now very close to completing the digipack. I have completed the inside page and am now currently working on the back cover. I strongly believe that my inside page is the strongest page of the digipack. The design of the inside page has manage to sum up the type of artist i attempted to portray rather finely.  I am very satisfied withthe inside page and as I said I am now on to the back cover. I am running low on time now so it seems as if the back cover will be rushed in order to complete it in time for the deadline. The making of this digipack has shown that before making such productions, i need to plan and draw up a design of what i want. Doing this may have made me a lot more satisfied with the end product of teh digipack.

The adventures of the Digipack & Website...

The digipack is starting to come along better than it was before. I definetly feel it has improved from the last time i spoke about it and i think that i was able to congure up some ideas on how to create a intersting looking CD cover with the simple and basic photos I had. I ended up using only one photot of Darren which I copied and roatated 90 degrees horizontally. This meant that there was two of the same pictures, one being fliped and facing the other way. I believe that Using only one photo and editing it gave the cover the simplistic yet artistic look i was intending for and so I am quite happy with myself for this idea.

Though I believe that I have found a way to make a simple picture more interesting I still do not blieve that the CD front cover is as good as it should be. I am very close to finishing and I cannot think of much else that  I can add to the front cover.

Website

I think i am most pleased with my website. I have nearly completed the whole website and i only have the page tour dates left to complete. I was actually told yesterday that we were only getting graded on our home page of our website and the other pages werent meant to be done. This has meant that I wasted some unneccessarry time doingthe other pages on the website like 'Live tour dates' 'Gallery' and 'Contact us'. However i do feel that doing these other pages has given me greater insight into Ed Sheeran as an artist as it promted me to do more research into his website and other of his murchendise. This has been quite insightful and making the other pages has been very interesting and so i dont actually believe it was a waste of time. When i do complete the website i will definetly post the full website up on blogger for people to see the whole website.

I an really pleased with the development of the website. Choosing a blank document was definetly a= the best choice and worked out best for me. I felt that through looking at my website i managed to sell the Artist effectively to the young target audience. i think i still managed to portray and sustain the authentic image of Ed Sheeran so all in all i am very pleased witht he development of the website and hopefully next time i speak on the website it'll be to post the completed version of the site.

I need more pictures!

I am in the process of creating my website it is quite evident that i will need more pictures of our music artist. I did say in my other post that i felt that we needed to take a few more photos as i didnt think that we took enough. Bradely and Darren felt that they did have enough photos and didnt feel the need to take anymore but i feel that my website could do with a few more pictrues. I have got on to creating a gallery for my musician and a gallery worth of 5 pictures in my opinion doesnt look very good. For this reason, alongside having a variety of pictuess i asked darren if i could take a few more pictures of just him just so i can use to help promote the artist himself. Darren agreed to have more photos take of him and so this is what we got done today:

I felt these pictues focused on him as an artist and would give audiences more of an insight into him as an individual. The use of the gallery on my website is suppose to create this and help show a number of photos of Darren (Ed Sheeran) on a normal day. Once again i am attemting to portray this very genuine and authentic image of my artist through these pictures.

I was wrong...

Following from my last video post where I was exploring Wix and stated that "If it really is this easy I'll surely tell you guys", well unfortunately its not. After exploring the template and attempting to just put in my own  pictures as i stated in my video post i realised it wasn't very simple. The problem with he template is that seeing as the format is already set out for me, there are some things that i would have liked to change but i couldn't. There were many things that i wanted to take out and put in but seeing as it was a template that was out in front of me i could only use i=my individual creativity to a certain extent. Another disadvantage of the template was that when i had an image in my head i could not create exactly what i imagined in my head seeing as the template would restrict . what i wanted to do. I also found it difficult to alter and edit the template and it generally seemed much more complicated than and much more of a bad idea than i first thought of it.

When speaking to another media student in another class, she told me that she attempted to create her website on a template at first and also found it very difficult. She told me that she therefore created a blank Wix page and started it from scratch. I wasn't too sure about this idea as it seemed very time consuming but she assured me that its not as hard as it seems and that is actually much more convenient than using a template. She explained how using a blank Wix page would mean that all your thoughts and ideas could be regurgitated on to the page exactly how you imagine it. The  fact that doing it this way cannot put any limits on my own individual creativeness i listened to her advice and started a blank paged one. So far i feel i am getting along just fine and fine it much easier to operate and implement my ideas. Creating the website seems like much more fun now and looks like i will be able to design exactly what i want. This is how the front page looks so far:

Digipack...

The photo shop work is proving to be a bit of a struggle so far. Though i did manage to do a bit of practice work on photoshop the other day, creating the real product for my artist is provng to be hard. Not only am i finding it hard to use the features but i am also finding it hard to come up with CD cover ideas. I am using a digipack template to understand the format of a digipack and to know exactly how many sides i will need to make. The digipack template was shown to me by bradely. He explained to me that it would help me a lot to know the kind of images to make and it would guide me on size measurements. The template is just one that we found on google but is proving very helpful to bring in some clarity on how these digipacks are to be made. This is the picture of the template that i am using:

 As you can see the template provides guidance on how big my image should be. The template also shows me how the digipack will be set out and so therefore how many pages of the digipack is going to be needed. This template definetly helped me understand what i am creating much more but i am still stuck for ideas on how to go about creating my digipack and what would look good.

 

 

One of the greatest challenges in making this digipack seems to be with the pictrues that i have. I am still not 100% satisfied with them. I feel that when taking the first set and teh second set of pictrues we only considered the website and not the digipack. When opening all the pictures that we did have of our artist i felt that there wernt any real innovative pictures taken that i could do much with on photoshop. Many of the pictuures were very much, a close up shot on his face or an instrument. The shots seemed quite basic and simple and there was no real picture that was taken from a innovative angle or a shot that looked really intersting. I realised that at the time of taking these pictures, this was the desired effect that we took a picture that represented our artist Ed Sheeran for the meek and modest personality that he ad. In order to do this we went for simple shots without considering in mind the digipack. In my opinion the digipack images ought to be slightly different as it is a photoshop program and we need to have the opportunity to edit it. I believe that we could have taken a picture from a different angle and captured more of his body by doing a medium shot or something similar to that. I think this would have given the digipack a differnt but yet simplistic look.

 

However with the pictures ii have i find it very hard to do anything innovative or smart. Many of the pictrues are jus close up shots and s this had made it diffivult for me to design a good looking digipack. I aam definetly struglling with the making of this digipack and am hoping some ideas come to my head quick, After the session today this is what i fininshed with:



 

More on Wix...

Completed & Uploaded

Bradely has finally fininshed all the last bits and pieces for the video. We had to add a few effects and accurately lip sync all our shots. A lot of the last bits were done by bradely in his free times in school. Bradely used the mac many times during his free periods to finish editing the last bits being as the closing deadline was fast approaching. Not all of our free lessons coincided and seeing as bradely was the main person to assemble the video, he ended up doing nearly all of the last bits of editing. It was clear to see that bradely put in alot of hard work into the editing and so me and darren  tried to contributed as much as we could to the editing ideas when we all had a coinciding free period. We all seem to be generally pleased with the end product. The only thing that we are not completely happy with is the quality of the video once we uploaded it on to YouTube. When uploaded, the video looks much more blury and seems to lack the quality camera view it had when were putting the video together. Our subject teacher said that when transferring our videos from imovie on to YouTube it sometimes losses quality.  Wee also foundthat when uploaded some of the lip syncing has gone off but it seems that not much can be done about that so we have left it how it is.

This is our music video, Ed sheeran - Grade 8. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNXmE5LMSbA&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=7

Photos...

I have now signed up for Wix and as you can see from my last video post started to get familiar with it. I done the same with Photoshop and so i figured with time quickly closing in on us that i should begin on the ancillary tasks. In order to begin this though we figured that we need a couple of photos of our main artist. Everyone in the group needs to produce their own website and digipack with he same music artist. So we have all agreed to use the same pictures of Darren (as Ed Sheeran). We all will have individual websites and digipacks with our own design, format and text.

So today we went out as a group and took pictures of Darren alongside Lauren, the other main character in the video who acted as 'the girlfreind'. It was very hard at first to come up with picture ideas that we felt were appropriate for a website and a digipack. There was a lot of thought that had to be put in to the type of music artist that we have and what we represent through the image and so we considered this very carefully and closely. After spending a lot of time thinking of picture ideas we started actually taking pictures. We started with the idea of them being a couple as portray in our music video and so many pictures of that relationship nature was taken. This is some of them now:

We also thought of conveying our artist as an actual musician. When looking into Ed Sheeran in the early stages of our research we found out that he is a very sincere and genuine musician. What i mean by this is that Ed Sheeran is a very stripped back musician in the sense that what you see is what you get. He isn't a typical pop artist, that have songs written for them and have countless alterations on their voices when recording. He is a musician, a singer and a songwriter and so we attempted to take pictures that would sell our artist as a musician as well as a product. We ended up taking a picture of the guitar, a plain simple guitar.

Though it looks like a simple picture, this image was intended to sum up the kind of artist that we are trying to portray. A Modest, genuine and authentic musician.

These are the only pictures that we have taken however i do not feel that this will be enough photos to make both a digipack and a website while trying to keep a variety of images in both products. Nevertheless, i will attempt to begin making these two products and if any more images are needed we'll take more pictures and keep you posted.

This is some of the practice work that i have done on photoshop. My poor experiments on here seemed to be to some extent very useful as i managed to familiarise myself with many of the features i had completely forgotten about. This practice session was a form of amusement to me but on a serious level did help me regain some confidence on photoshop. This is the work that i've done:

 

 

 

Photoshop...

 

 

As part of the ancillary task, we have been told to create a digipack for our music artist. This CD promotion is to be made on photo shop something that i am not very strong at as i explained in my previous post. The other day i attempted to use the program and familiarise myself with the features once again. I do not use Photoshop in my spare time so my AS piece of coursework was the first time that i had used Photoshop and since completing that i haven't used Photoshop since. I started playing around on the program and a few things started to come back to my memory. I began familiarising myself with the use of layers and the use of different features like transforming images on scale, rotation and colour. I used a few old images i had stored in my files and some images off Google to practice with, hopefully next time I'll be doing the real thing on an image of my music artist.

Gaps filled, now on to the next...

So we have now filled in all the gaps that were remaining and have just uploaded it on to the mac. We watched the music video all the way through and it is good to see the video nearly completed. there are still a number of bits that need to be edited, moved around, lip synced and etc but most of the video is now complete. We have now began on our ancilary tasks and so we are looking at creating a website and a digipack for our music artist. This seems like it will be a big challenge for me as i am not very strong on photoshop and havenrt used the programme in while but hopefully with some practice i will be able to use the programme efficiently. We were told that we would create our website on a programme called wix. I have already created myself a wix account, this is a print screen of me signing on tot he programme:

Unexpected Gaps...

After editing all the studio scenes in place we noticed that there were some unexpected gaps were there shouldn't have been. the seconds that we thought we had covered for some reason weren't actually covered and must have been due to a mistake on our part seeing as we recorded the bits that needed to be covered but must have done so incorrectly. Time is now running by fast and our deadline is very quickly approaching so we all agreed that we needed to fill in these gaps as soon as possible. This was a challenge for us as we had to think what we were going to fill in these gaps with and we had to use a different location and different props to add a variety of locations and props to the video. Mise-en-scene was something that we had to consider but we had to do it in a rush. We had around 25 seconds to cover spread around 5 different gaps so on average each gap was around 5  ideas seconds long. Me and Darren have started thinking of shot ideas and plan to go out and record them tomorrow. This has shown us the importanc ein accuracy when we plan and prepare for our shots. i think judging from the last couple of experiences we have had we are ereally starting to notice that we need much more preperation, dedication and accuray in shooting and planning our video.

Our Lady friend...

Our next shot required assistance again from Lauren who acted as Darrens (Ed Sheeran's) girlfreind. This was noce again another shot wehere we attempted to show footage that correlated to the specific lyrics of the song. This shot was a close up of Laurens whole body starting from the bottom of her and slowly going up to her body and ending at her face. The lyrics for this video clip qouted "Your body is my ball point pen". This is why there was emphesis on Laurens body.

Straight after the close up laurens body we shot a clip of darren kissing lauren on the head. This once again related to the song lyrics as the song then goes on to say "your mind is my new best friends". His love for her mind is displayed by the kiss on the head which we atempted to capture through a normal medium shot.

SMASH!

We were out taking shots again and this time we had all our props that we needed in order to shoot the POV shot. As I explained in my last post this shot was supposed to capture Darren (Ed Sheeran) Drinking, passing out and smashing the bottle. The whole motive of this shot was once again to associate with the specific lyrics of the song. This is something that we plan to have running through the whole video.

In this part of the song the lyrics quote "This drink is a liver killer, my chest is a pillow for your weary head to lay to rest". The shot was to capture Darren passing out from the effects of the alcohol and ending up with a shot of his head resting on the concrete pavement. This shot was supposed to capture what the song was saying in video footage. When actually attempting to shoot this we realised that when we did tried to do a POV shot it didn’t look very good at all. This is because to achieve this shot we had to make the camera do what our main character is believed to be doing and so we spun the camera 36o degrees for the desired effect of our main character spinning round. After this we tipped the tripod in a downwards motion so that the camera was essentially falling.

When we looked at this footage on the camera we realised that everything just looked blurry. We believed that die to the quality of the camera, it couldn’t pick up all the details of the surroundings when spinning around. This meant that everything just looked like one big blur with no clear imagery. Because of this we decided that we wouldn’t do a POV shot and instead just use a normal close up shot to capture the story and actions that we were trying to portray.

Out taking shots...

Todays shots were quite intersting and challenging. This time we all went out as a group to shoot the neccessary scenes. Our initial plan before actually heading out was to shoot the part of the video where our artist falls down in a POV (point of view) shot and smashes a glass bottle from his hand. However due to not having the correct props to do this scene we had to switch the schedule around and shoot another scene.

So instead of shooting that scene we took a shot of darren walking down towards the camera while singing. During the whole video, we have made a pattern of trying to associate some bits of the video with a specific word from the song and so this is what we planned to do in this shot. The song lyrics qoute "I'll never keep it bottled up" and that point a bottle is thrown into Darrens reach and then he throws it away again. Shooting this scene was difficult as I was the one to thrown the bottle to darren but it was extreemly challenging to throw the bottle in the easiest way possible for Darren to catch without taking his eye off the camera. We had to shoot this scene several times before we could get it right but eventually we did.

Shooting & editing go two seperate ways...

Now that we have all the clips and shots from the studio session uploaded the next thing we had to do was to begin editing. The studio session included a lot of shots  however and may take some time editing.  As a group we decided to use our time more effectively this time and agreed that it is counter productive for all of us to sit and edit one video. We therefore agreed that while Bradely woked on the editiing of the video, me and Darren would go off and get other shots that needing doing, done. So this is what we done today and we definelty made the most of our 2 hours media lesson. Me and darren shot mostly in the school premises. One of our task was to shoot a mirror shot. As a whole group we contemplated on this not too long ago and discussed how we would take the shot without being the camera or camre man being seen in the shot as the reflection of the mirror would show me. This was kind of a challenge for me and Darren today to see whether we could take theshot without any extras in the shot. We had seen it done before so we knew that we could work our way around it. This mirror shot is acually a very popular in many of Ed Sheerans videos and we felt that this was a similarity that we would pick from him and apply it to our Artist. This is a screen shot of some of Ed Sheerans mirror shots:

I tried experimenting a few times to try and achieve this shot. I first tried to take the shot from the side so it wasnt facing the mirror directly. this would mean that it would get the side of darrens face and still manage to capture the mirror into the shot. The problem was that by doing it this way it meant that we couldnt see the reflection in the mirror and instead we could only see Darren looking into a mirror. What i then did was that i was able to take the shot standing on a chair. This meant that i took it from a high angled shot as if the camera is looking down slighlty. Aswell as this i positioned my self at the door of the toilets which was slighlty to the right of the mirrror meaning that the reflection of the mirror couldnt capture me or the camera. The achievement of this shot along witht he efficient use of time made it a good day.

 

The clips have been uploaded!

Yesterday, we uploaded our shots from the studio session on to the mac and started assembling the shots in order and synicing the clips witht he words. Bradely stokes is the strongest on the mac and the best with editing so he does most of the editing work. Normally if there are not other scenes to shoot we input our ideas to bradely on what editing we feel would look good. On this day this is what we did. we all sat down and uploaded the shots and started looking back at our plans and stroy boards to see how we would fit these shots in.

As always the biggest problem for bradely was synicing the words with the lip movement. This is always a difficult challenge for us and so we all had to give our assistance in attempting to sync the words correctly. when lip syncing we realised that we had many gaps ion between the video and this caused some confusion. Bradely then decided to make a shot list in order to know which bits needed to go were.

The studio session...

On Wednesday me and the group along with our friend who had agreed to co-star in the music video walked down to the photo studio. We got in and started all getting our equipment set up. We had to bring a number of things with us on that day like a tripod, camera and a guitar. the guitar was vital for the type of genre that we were doing as when researching into many similar artist they were all of an acoustic/indie rock genre and they were all usually seen with a guitar in their videos. We felt that this was an important convention to portrait and this was why we felt the guitar was so vital in our music video.

When we got to the studio we realised that the tripods that we had brought was actually broken. we had to asked the studio if they had one that we could use but they didn't and so we had to just make the best of the situation and film without a tripod.

Another piece of equipment we had in the filming was two chairs, one black one and one white one. This was in our original plan and story board to have chairs in the studio. Fortunately we didn't have to bring this to the studio as my friends had told me that the studio has a black and a white cushioned chair that we could use and so this is was what we did.

Generally i felt the session in the studio went very well although there were some down parts. Realising that the tripod had broken and not having any other subsidiary was something that we regretted. We found it hard to continue as we needed the tripod for stability. this was a really valuable experience as we learnt to be prepared for every scene we shoot. i felt that the preparation for the studio wasn't as good as it could have been. A lot of the equipment was gathered just a couple of minutes before we left to go to the studio. Though we had already thought through were the equipment was going to be and were we would collect them from we should have gathered all the equipment the day before and stored it all in one place. This would have saved us a lot of time on the day and given us the time to check the equipment and make any replacements needed.  This was a valuable lesson learnt and has resulted in us hopefully planning and preparing our shots with a lot more care.

Booked & ready...

I've just come off the phone with a friend of mine who was talking just about doing a session in his dads photo booth  me and the team did talk this over about having a professional white background that would run as a theme through out the whole of the video. The team agreed with this and felt that it was a good idea so i had to just go ahead and book it. That's what I've just finished doing.  I did previously book the appointment for the 14th of November. Due to some miss-communication on my part there was a mix up as i had told my mate to book us in for a wrong time as we weren't all available. After just coming off the phone with him we have confirmed to have the studio booked for the 15th instead which is on Thursday. I had let the rest of the team know previously and they all told me the time that they would be available so we have confirmed to use the studio on Thursday 15th from 10 till 11.

We have also finally picked a girl who is going to feature in our video as the main characters girlfriend, we did leave this till quite late because of the other things we had to sort out like recording the first couple of shots and finalizing our main character. However we have finally got her and she has let us know that she will be available on Thursday 10 till 11. So we will let her know that it is officially booked and hopefully all goes to plan on Thursday.

We continued shooting today from were we left off yesterday. We had to do one last close up shot of Darren's lips and then we went off school premises to shoot some other scenes. When planning our storyboard for the video we discussed about Mise-en-Scene and the importance of it. We tried to thinking of a place with a really good backdrop that we could video in but we couldn't quite pick a location. So this afternoon, when we went off school promises we did so rather spontaneously, not really knowing where we were going to shoot. We planned to not go to far and only wonder around the surrounding areas of the school to see of there were any nice looking places that could be used to video. We did this and we were lucky to walk past a small waterfall with a mini bridge on top . We felt that this was quite a nice location and would be a nice place to take a shot of Darren just singing the words. These are pictures of the location:

At first we weren't too sure of where we were going to shoot it from as if he stood on the bridge we were worried that we wouldn't be able to capture enough of the waterfall. Bradley then had an idea of Darren actually standing in the middle of the waterfall in order to really show and be able to capture the backdrop. There were big rocks in the small waterfall that allowed Darren to do this and so he did. For this session i recorded all the shots and so tried to guide Darren on what rock to stand on in order to get the best shot.

We didn't have enough time to take anymore shots after this so we then made our way back to school. Generally i felt today went well although i do think we could have used our time much more productively. I felt that we wasted a large amount of time from occasionally going off task and also from our lack of preparation and our spontaneous approach to shooting. I think that if we had taken 3 minutes to sit down, discuss and decide what location near to the school we were going to shoot at we would have saved about 15 or 20 minutes. Planning is so important and is something that we need to get to grips with as a group.

The first shoot...

We decided that we needed to get going with our video so we began the fist shot of the story board as planned. For this shot we only needed drumsticks and a drum so it was quite simple and easy to do in school. this shot was the introduction to the video so it was quite important that it was done well. the song starts with three drum taps as an intro to the actual song. this is why we thought to show the drums and the drumsticks. We planned to do this from a point of view shot making it a much more interesting first shot. Brad did this shot by holding the camera directly above the drumsticks as Darren taped them. We also took the next couple of shots in the same location. they were all extreme close up shots so the background wasn't in the shots. this meant that it didn't matter were we recorded the first few shots. the other shots were a close up of his lips singing the song and a close up of his eyes which we plan to fade in with a picture of a sunset which we will take some time next week. We uploaded the shots on to the Mac and Brad was able to sync the three drumstick taps quite neatly to the drumstick taps in the song. As a group we thought the first bit of the video looked really good.

Today we completed our shot list :

Permission for music and all that jazz...

Before making our music video we all had to ask permission for the music we were going to use as it didnt lawfully belongto us. We therefore wrtie a letter to Ed Sheerans music label, Atlantic Records to ask for permsion to use the song. This is a print screen of the letter being drafted up:

The next main task to do was to pick our main character. we had done all of our planning, our research but we didn't have a main character. Darren had briefly mentioned that he wanted to be the main character earlier but it wasn't officially decided. So we finished our story board just before our half term break and so we needed to decide what people were going to feature in our video as we were due to begin filming the week we got back from the half term break. We had to make an official decision of who the main character would be and who would play the girlfriend in the video. Darren said that he still had no problem with being the main character. however i mentioned that i felt that i know someone who would probably be more suited to the style of the video, and the style of the music. The group agreed with me that if i could get him that we would use him as the main character. so through the half term break i contacted this friend of mine called Matt. Matt said that he'd be more than happy to do it but we'd have to give him the times that we were planning to shoot because he has college 3 days a week.

Hearing this got me thinking about the practicality of having him as the main character in our video. It would mean that we will have very little accessibility to him  and especially when we are quite tight for time we need all the time we can get. Due to this i thought he wouldn't be the best option as a main character when thinking practically. When we got back from our half term break i expressed this to the team and they agreed with me. We then started rushing through the school looking for someone that could be the main character in the video. We though that if they go to the same 6th form as us we would have more access to them rather than looking for someone outside the school.

We managed to find someone who said they would be willing to do it but i had a concern with that person being the main character. We managed to get a student in our school called Harrison who is quite musical and had ginger hair. my big concern with having him in the video was that our video would start to look to much like a mimic of Ed Sheerans. It just seemed that it would seem like to much of a copy rather than an original. As a group we had mixed feeling about this and so we asked the opinion of our Class peers and our subject teacher and they also thought that it would take away from the original aspect of our video. Due to this we all then agreed not to use Harrison as the main character in the video. So we still had no main character. After all the commission we ended up going back to square one. We balancing originality and practicality that the best option was to simply have our group member Darren as the main character and so we made that official.

We had to come to a final decision  for our song choice and our artist. when it came to it it was a decsion between Ed sheeran - Grade 8, Bruno Mars - locked out of heaven. at the end we felt that our research proved to us that Ed sheeran was a much more relevant artist to a majority of people ans so it would be more appropiate and more relevevant to do an Ed sheeran song. the song Grade 8 is also fairly popular so people will be able to sing and dance along to the song and the video.

So when we deccided on the song, the lesson after we began planning our story board. Planning the story board was still very difficult for us even though we had done it before in our previous task. We knew this time the importance and significance of planning but we still found it difficult to plan precisely each shot.  however we still got on and did it. I had many ideas that i fed into the group as we had been given time to think about our video previously. So from the moment we decided on the song i had thoughts about the video running through my mind. Being quite interested in music and music videos myself i suggested that the actions and the shots we take should tell a story. i had an idea of telling a story through out the whole video and then rewinding the story of the video at the end. We all also thought that the shots should be relevant to the words of the song so we would think of having certain props that is mentioned in the song. An example of this is at 14 seconds through the song Ed sheeran says "I'll never keep it bottled up". Due to this line we though it would be relevant encorporate a bottle in that particular shot. We planned the video like this the whole way through. the story board took us around 2 lessons and a bit more. Our lessons last for an hour so it would have taken us 2 hours and a bit more to think of and complete our video story board.

This is our completed story board:

Here is the link to or prezzi powerpoint:

http://prezi.com/ohitawyvxe_x/ed-sheeran-similar-artists-and-genres/

We are still carrying on with our research into our four main artist. i personally felt that Ed Sheeran would be the best option and most appropriate artist for us to do a music video for. From my research into the other artist and through my own knowledge it was evident that Ed Sheeran was more talked about and more of a favourite in England. Ed sheeran also had more songs that are known and played more around England, once again making him more relevant to our target audience. Also i felt that his music and him as an artist was more relevant to a large amount of people and so this meant we could possibly do much more when making the music video. This is my view point but i am not yet too sure on who Darren and Bradely think are the righ artist to choose.
Currently we are putting together a powerpoint on prezi to show all the artist that we;ve looked at and how they are similar to our main choice of Ed Sheeran. Me and darren have been given different artist to research into seprately. I am researching on Justin Nozuka while  Darren is researching on Ben howard. Bradelyis going to complie all the information we gather and present it on prezi.

This is a picture of my group researching together:

The new questionnaire that we handed out had great feedback. We attmpted to transfer all the information from the questonaire on to a spider diagram indicating what our findings were.  This was very helpful as we then had a sheet were all our fiindings from our questionnaire was all clear and precise on one sheet. On this sheet we also listed the useful bits that we found from our BAD questionnaire. We felt that it could still be usefull when coming to decide what artist we wre going to choose.

This is the sheet with all our questionnaire findings on:

The other day we re-created our questionnaire and handed it out to a group of young people in our 6th form that non of us had any social link to. This made the questionnaire much more reliable and credible. Also the answers produced were really helpful and gave us the insight that we needed to make a firm choice on what artist to choose for our final piece. This is a picture of some of our well answered questionnaires

These are some of the people we asked to fill in our questionnaire. They permitted us to take pictures while they were reading through our questionnaire



After deciding that we were going to stay in the same group and that we were going to do a music video we quickly started making decisions on what song we were going to use to create our music video to. We were told that a music video had to be to a song that was either 10 years old or a song that hadn't had an official video released for it. As a group we all quickly agreed that we preferred to use a more current song that hadn't been released as with an official video yet.

Thinking of songs to choose from was definitely a really difficult for us. We eventually realised that it would be easier to look at genres of music and artist in those genres that we could select. Before we could do this we had to find out who our target audience was and what genre and what artist would be most applicable to them. We all decided that our target audience would be old teenagers to young adults which would be in the bracket of 16 - 21 year olds. We wanted our music video to target the everyday youth of today, this meant that the target audience was quite a large window and so we needed or video to relate to many different people who all shared a common factor...youth.

Bearing in mind the fact that we needed a music video and a song that related to many different people we began thinking of artist that would fit this profile. After a couple of lessons these were the names that we had listed to explore :

Ed sheeran
Justin Nozuka
Ben Howard
Jason Mraz
These were the four artist that we felt could relate to the widest amount of our targeted audience. For this we reason we carried out a questionnaire in order to gain further information. We believed that the view point of our target audience would and should be a great significance to our decision on our final piece and for this reason we carried out a questionnaire.
The results of this questionnaire did not go to plan...

This is a picture that we took of our questionnaire. this was taken after we gave out the questionnaire and collected them back in. from the picture above it is very clear to see that people didn't take our questionnaire very serious and we didn't get a great deal of information from this. With these results we tried to pick out the good and useful bits and pieces. This was extremely difficult as most of it was either rude and irrelevant comments or just  imprecise, under detailed and ambiguous answers. We tried to work out why our questionnaire didn't go to plan and what had went wrong.

Firstly discovered that we had went to the wrong type of people to fill in our questionnaires. by this we mean our friends and close companions. These are the people that we socialise with and not in a serious manner so asking them to answer our questionnaire in a serious manner probably wasn't the best decision. Asking people we knew may have also added an unreliable edge to our questionnaire.

Another problem we found in our questionnaire was that our questions weren't constructed very well. We discovered that we asked too many closed questions which prompted a a closed answer, leaving us with a very undetailed questionnaire. We also felt we didn't ask as many appropriate questions as we could have or made it easier for the people to answer in more depth and detail. After seeing the poor results of our first questionnaire we have decided to re-create the questionnaire and hand it out to some different people in order to get more helpful and efficient feedback.

For my final task i am working in a group with Darren Cousins and Bradley Stokes. This is so as we worked together to do our preliminary task and got on really well as a team. This encouraged us to go forward and do our main task together.
This is the brief we have been given for this task :
A promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music promo, video, together with  a cover for its release and a web page promoting the artist .
or
A promotion package for a new film, including a teaser trailer together with a film magazine front cover, featuring the film and a poster for the film.

After discussing our options of the two briefs we decided to to do the music video. This was for a number of different reasons but mainly because we felt that as we had only just experienced creating a music video, we would have knowledge that we wouldn't have if we were to make a film trailer in which we had no previous experience. Watching and evaluating this made us aware of all the mistakes we made and how we could improve on them. Due to this we felt we would be more confident in making a music video and produce better quality work if we made a music video. Along with this i will be creating a cover that will be for a digipack (CD cover) and be creating a website to promote the artist of my music video. The deadline for the music video is November 30th and the deadline for everything else on the music video including the digipack, the web page and an evaluation is to completed by the 14th of December.

After uploading our video on to YouTube, we all had a lesson were everyone in the class watched all the videos and got to give evaluative feedback on their own and other peoples videos. this was a very effective lesson as we were able to see the things we done well and the things we needed to improve on. Watching back on our video there were so many things that we felt could have been improved on. I think only then is when the group realised how essential it is to plan and prepare properly as there were many shots that weren't thought through well enough.

We also realised that we took far too little shots. i think due to us not seeing the significance in planning, there was clearly a lack of preparation. this was shown through the amount of shots there were. Once again this wasn't realised until we sat and evaluated our video. I pointed out that for future reference we would need to take much more shots as i felt a lot of our shots seemed to drag for a long time. this made the video seem as if it was being dragged out. Certain shots were very prolonged and didn't engage the audience

As well as this we also had big difficulties with the lip syncing for a certain part of the sing. this problem occured as we had used 2 different versions of the song on two different days of filming. this meant she was singing to a slightly different song on one of the days. this took up a lot of our time trying to mend this situation and eventually we had to cut a large part of the song.  we learnt a valuable lesson from this and identified that when making such a project next time, using the same song is crucial.

Location was also something that we evaluated as a group. When watching it we felt that there wasn't enought variety of location. Most of the shots we took were all in school and all the ones that weren't all still had a similar backdrop to them (Grass, trees). We felt like we didn't really put much thought into the location and the relevance of the location as well as the diversity of locations.

These are all the things we found out while evaluating our video.

As a practise task we have been given the option to create either a music video or a sweed film in a group. I am in a group with Darren Cousin and Bradley Stokes. The three of us decided to make a music video instead of a sweeded film as we all found greater interest in the creation of a music video. We were given song options to choose from and we chose to do a Mariah Carey's song. Looking back on it now this was probably not the best song choice as it was a very slow paste song and prompted us to drag many of the scenes in the video.

As a group we were being introduced to the concept of making a music video for the first time so it was quite a new experience to us. We were definitely not aware of the amount of  planning and preparation that a music video required and only began to get a small idea when we were told to create a story board to plan precisely each shot and even then i don't believe we fully grasped the complexity and preparation involved in creating a music video. Nevertheless, we planned to the standard we felt was acceptable. we created a story board with 10 different shots in which we described each camera shot, sketched each camera shot and stated the duration of each camera shot. when we were first told to make a storyboard, i didn't see a need for this. I see myself as being rather creative and so did the other guys in  my team, so we were more keen on just going out with a camera and seeing what we came up with and thought this would be a better way of us working. We were absolutely wrong. We did end up planning and creating a story board which was of great use to us. The story board gave us a a sketch of what we were to do and really helped save a lot of time. Also being able to sit down as a group and discuss ideas meant that the end conclusion was well though through and such conclusions wouldn't have been thought of if we made up shots as we went along.

This is a picture of my story board (Back & Front)

We have just finished creating and editing the last bits of our practise video. Lip syncing was a big challenge to us and took up quite a bit of our time. While editing we realised that we had used different versions of the song when recording on different days. This meant that in a certain bit of the video, our main characters lip syncing was completely off sync with the music. Eventually we had to cut part of the video which wasn't a very clean cut. However, bearing in mind the difficulty we put ourselves in, and the fact that we were beginners, i think we done an exceptional job on finding a solution. Bradley stokes, a member of my team done a fantastic job on this and shone especially for the technical skills he displayed when this problem was identified.

This is the link for our practise video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4tdADU8zRo&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=5&feature=plcp

This is my A2 media blog. I will be posting and updating you on the progress i make towards my final media piece.