Practice digipak

In today's lesson, our media teachers refreshed our memory on how to use Photoshop to design a digipak. I was really excited and got straight into it. We used photo's of our media teacher Dan as an artist and it was amazing to see how everyone made a completely different digipak even though we had the same photo's.

FRONT

This is the front of the digipak, i left the photo the same but added an effect to it which made it looked like a cartoon effect.

The name of the artist must be bigger than the title of the album and so i conveyed this through my digipak. I used a block plain font and made it white on a black background. I used this idea from Example's album cover (the artist of our music video song choice)

The album in which i adapted my idea from.

BACK

This is the back of the digipak and it has a list of all the songs that are on the album. It also has credits which gives thanks and promotes different aspects of the album, artist and record labels.  The barcode is at the bottom of the back so it can be scanned in stores.There is also a website of the artist Dan, so fans can find out more information.

A great authority speaks....

Kudiwa and Demi - great blogs. Anyone who includes Bear in a Big Blue House has to be doing well. Not sure we needed to see Mary and Rebecca staring at the screen for 3 and a half minutes though (feedback video). Could do something on skills development for the video part now you've finished it.
But really good, interactive effort - well done and keep it up with the Digipak work - it looks so strong at the moment.

Ismail - really pleasing that you've now done everything on the checklist - well done in catching up so completely.

Joe......how much blogging have you done in November ? Make up for it in December.

Getting a start on the digi-pak

Monday 28th November 2011...

Today's lesson we discussed the second part to our coursework (Digi-pak)...
Before summer we used the skills we had learnt about digi-paks and photoshop to create our own digi-paks



 With our own group digi-pak I will have to think efficiently about how to promote and display the Album...
things I have to keep in mind:

• How the image connect with the album and genre 
• How coulours reflect the connotation of the mood of our Album and present the image
• What image the colours connote
• How the colours will connect with the target audince 
• Graphics- How they link with the genre 
• Image mise en scene... Effective use to present something that will appeal to the target audience

From what i have seen in the past... Our genre (Dubstep) is very futuristic and colourful...
The mix in colour and graphics creating an image which can be connoted as 'Loud' and 'Fun'...
The dubstep album digi-paks I have seen have very urban and futuristic...

Examples of Dubstep digi-pak covers...




Something else that could also help in the production is analysing our original artist's own digi-paks...
'Example' creates music of the dubstep genre and addresses some of our audience, By analsysing hos digi-paks i will be able to compare and gain the form and conventions of a digi-pak in the Dubstep genre.

  

I will also need to understand the type of graphics that are associated with Dubstep...

Production: Skills development: Editing skills

I was very keen on editing, I have an interest in it. Finding ways to make it look good, waiting on the outcome to see what how it would be and what other people would think about it.
So getting down to the editing, these are some of the skills I learnt.
Lip syncing:
 First we layed down all the base tracks that we had and then we had to match it up to the song so that it would be in sync. To do this we found the start of the lyrics of the song and when we found that we put a marker by pushing "M" on the keyboard, then we went to one of the base tracks and had to find the exact same point of the song and pushed "M" again to add another marker, after doing this we went onto the timeline and matched the markers up so they were in line. This is how we did the lip syncing.
Changing scenes:
To do this we would cut every base track to the beat. Then we would use the razor tool and hold down "Shift" and click on where we would want to cut it, by holding down shift it would cut every base track so we wouldn't have to do it one by one. Then to get the scene you wanted to show, it would be which ever one is on top, so if we wanted the second scene we would have to delete the first base track.
Changing faces:
For this we had to get lots of different girls to stand in the same spot for 5 seconds while we record them, after we did this we imported it onto Final Cut Pro and imported the song too. In our song there is a specific point where the beat drops at 41 seconds. We wanted each beat to be a girls face, so we had to cut the clips down to size and get it to match up with the beat, we didn't record enough girls so we had to use to same girls again to make up the rest of the beat as it lasted long. 
Slow motion: 
This was pretty simple, to do this we imported a clip, then clicked on it. We went to modify at the top, then change speed, then it says rate 100%, to make it go slower we had to lower the rate, we choose 40% and vice versa to speed it up you increase the rate. 
Black and White effect:
To do this we had to import a clip, click on it then go to effects, then video filters, image control and then desaturate. 

Production: Skills development: how I approached planning differently to AS

This year, the music video task was much harder than last year's thriller opening task. For the thriller opening we had a solid idea that we would stick with, after we knew the story we would be doing, we immediately came up with the location we would choose, the props we would use, the costumes that would be used and who would be starring in it. Once we had all of this we quickly picked up the pace and began filming straight away, we went to our location, set up the equipment and started filming, granted we wasn't that experienced in any of this, it was the first time doing any of this, the acting in front of the camera, getting all the right shots, making sure that everything was in frame. After our first day, we got back to college and started editing, we did find a few things that we needed to fix, so we went back and re-filmed it and everything was done, we just edited it and finished.
This year on the other hand I found it difficult, we had to pick out a song to use, we were struggling with that, after looking through many different songs, one of the people in our group (Joe) stumbled upon one (Skream ft Example - Shot Yourself in the Foot Again), everyone in the group listened to it and thought that it would be an excellent choice as it was a dubstep genre and would be different to everyone elses. Our group came up with several ideas on to what the music video would be about and we were struggling on picking out one. We had to send out emails to the artists to try and gain copyright permissions to use the song. We then came to a conlusion on what the story of the music video would be and we booked the equipment and began filming. This year we had gained experience so we knew how to use the equipment, how to set it up, how the frame the shot etc. After two days of filming we went back to college and started to edit, we were getting the hang of this as we had learnt how to do it before we had breaken up for summer holiday's.
Again we found little problems, we got feedback from the teachers and needed to go back and re-film, this happened again and we went back a second time to re-film. This time we were in luck and everything was all right, now editing needed to be done, we researched on which effects to use, looked at different music videos, looked at the original and how we would make it different to that.

Some of the editing process and using Final Cut Pro

Importing files into Final Cut Pro

The many effects and video filters we could use for our music video

Showing how to export the music video so it could be watched or converted to be put onto blogger.

Showing how to render the music video when "Cmd + R" wasn't working.

One of the effects we used to make the clips merge over each other.