Individual Statement - Tom Burlinson

Individual statement

Throughout this project I have worked as part of a group, this is a statement of my individual contribution to the project.

As a group we all had a discussion and talked about what song we would like to use for our project and then we took work from our previous individual blogs to create the new blog. I was responsible for setting up the group gmail account to use and creating the blog, having maintained it throughout the project, posting research and embedding videos when they are given to me as well as more recently putting all the work in date order so it makes sense. I was also responsible for uploading a fair few of the videos onto YouTube.  However I was not solely responsible for this and other members of my group contributed.

The research and planning was split up among our group and we all made an equal contribution to this, I had responsibility for organising the cast members and making sure we could film on certain days etc, like a producer in a professional studio. I also contributed to research with slide shows and videos on music labels and research into current bands music videos.

With filming and editing I feel I put in a lot of work, doing lots of shoots and spending a large amount of my free time editing, while I am not suggesting my group partners did no work, I will admit that I feel I did most of the work when it came to editing. However I must stress that this is because of the fact that I enjoyed it very much and wanted to maintain control, which is a flaw on my behalf - not being able to share that area very well with others.

My contribution to the auxiliary tasks was less so than with the filming and editing, I organised the space and models for the photoshoot and while I attended the shoot I did not take part and did not edit any of the photos or the resulting digi-pak, website, and poster. I did however set up the bands two pages on the social networking sites – twitter and facebook.

Overall I made a large contribution to my groups project and put in a lot of hours work, but flaws on my part may have meant it was less possible for other members in my group to make as large a contribution to the filming and editing as myself, something which I would change if given another chance. 

Individual Statement - Pryank Patel

As a group we selectively chose a song that we all liked and felt we could produce a reasonable video. We had many tasks to complete in order to begin the construction and production of the video. We have many ancillary, research and planning tasks to complete as a group. We divided the tasks up between the 4 of us and completed them then reported back to the group to make the tasks interactive and upload to the blog.

Personally, I help with the majority of the filming, editing, blog construction and blog posts. We also divided our group up with the practical and theory based work. 2 of us mainly took the editing filming and practical side of the coursework whilst the other 2 mainly focused on the blog posts. We all as a group had equal blog posts to complete and post, with feedback from the rest of the group.

From my experience of filming, editing and making movies/interactive pieces of media text have helped me improve my ability to handle the practical side in Media. Another thing I grasped from the construction phase of the project was how to use the equipment available to me like the Sony HD HR1000E, Pentax K-x, Final Cut Express and other media technologies I have learnt throughout the course. 

During the filming phase of the construction I went out and helped film with all the stages of the filming. I had a various range of ideas with the types of shot we used, so I assisted the rest of my group with the ideas. I filmed all of the band shot’s section for our video. I learnt about new camera shots/angles from the experience as I managed to obtain clips from high angles, low angles, a pan etc. I learnt how this helps the audience recognise that it is a music video and not a short film with all the fast editing as a key technique.

During the editing phase of the production, I largely assisted whilst taking a main role with it a certain times. As Final Cut Express is a hard programme to use fluently, we as a group had to divide our skills with the programme and learn different techniques. I feel that I have learnt a lot and helped a large amount with the editing phase.

To conclude I feel I have had a large input in the production, construction, research and planning and evaluation stages of our coursework. I particularly felt that I have had a large impact on the practical side of the course as well as the theory-based work with the interactive blog posts. I made myself available to edit, film and generally help my group whenever possible. 

Individual statement- Sophie Griffin

Individual Statement.

At the beginning of making our music video we had to complete research tasks, which we did individually, then each of us would feed back to the group to give each other a better understanding of what we were all doing as well as managing time more effectively.  As a group we discussed what song and genre we would like to use for our project until we found one, which we were happy with and believed we could make a good music video to, after this we took work off our individual blog to contribute towards our group blog.

As I was quite weak at editing as I have little experience of it, only from my preliminary task I had little editing practice so I decided to make a few of my research tasks into videos using ‘iMovie’, which I had to edit together, for example “music videos’ that influenced our music video”, which involved me finding music videos from already established artists within our genre then picking ones fairly similar to our to show where we got our inspiration from and I also contributed in editing our final music video. The genre of the song isn’t one I am particularly familiar with as it isn’t really music I would listen to so I also had to research the genre and the themes within that genre to give me a better idea of what our music video should contain, for example listening to music within this genre, watching music videos in this genre and researching styles of clothes.

As a group we had a photo shoot of the band in which we took shots at different angles and edited the best ones to make our poster, create and digi-pack and use on the website. I created the original poster, however I found it quite challenging as photo shop isn’t a program I use a lot but had some experience from creating my music magazine last year, I hadn’t used photo shop since creating my magazine in AS so I had to undergo a learning curve. However I overcame this by trial and error until I was happy with the outcome of the poster.

Overall, Completing this project majorly helped me improve my technical skills with editing footage as well as images, and also helped me realize how much work goes into making a music video and all the other tasks that go alongside it, for example posters, blogs, facebook pages and a lot of research.  I believe we all put in equal effort and tried our best to make our music video as interesting and aimed at our target market as possible and I think we all did very well.

Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation Question 3 - Audience Feedback

Evaluation Question 2

Evauluation Question 1

Bonus Feature: Directors Commentary

21st of March 2012

Today we continued working on our evaluation question then had a group discussion on how we were coming along.

Final product: Website

 Link

Final Product: Digipak

Front Cover

Inside Cover

CD disk art

Back Cover

Final Product: Digipak poster

Final product: Contraband - Stay With Me

20th of March 2012

Today we made the music video go live on youtube, it had been previously set to private whilst we worked on other parts of our Advanced Portfolio.

19th of March 2012

Today we worked on our evaluation questions; continuing with the editing of question 2 whilst working on a series of topics to discuss/a script for questions 1, 3, and 4. We split the questions up; 1 for each person in our group.

Website Construction

This is the original plan for the website.

This is the final website overview.

Construction:

Stage 1: Design and planning: For this stage I used Pages to create an overview for website. I researched other artists websites such as; You Me At Six, Eminem and Sum 41. From my analysis, I gathered information on general codes and convention to a music artists website, with the main features being the 'news' section, extravagant home page and a insight into one of their products (i.e a video or a music track in the background).

Stage 2: Initial construction: I had to create an account on wix.com website that allowed me to create a website free of charge and publish it live to the internet. However I had limited resources to construct the website such as; fonts, colours, constrained to certain options - not a full html website. 

 

Stage 3: Final construction: After I had fully planned how I wanted to create my final website piece, I went about putting it together. I had to adhere to specific codes and conventions to create the website. One problem I had creating the website was the range of fonts made available to me. We had a fonts for our original digipak for 'Contraband', and wix.com did not allow me not embed an outside font, so we had to change the fonts throughout our work. This was the only major setback as I could put in background music, which was my only other concern. Overall I believe the construction went well for a free website creator. 

Stage 4: Publishing the website: It was simple and easy to publish the website to the internet as Wix took care of all the complications and I was able to make my website live from the click of a button. 

16th of March 2012

Today we edited the video of audience feedback for our second evaluation question using Final Cut.

By now I have become proficient with Final Cut and was able to have a rough edit within a couple of hours, all that remains is the fine tuning. 

Band Social Networks

Here are the links for our fictional band for this project "Contraband", who appear in the music video:

Twitter

 Facebook

14th of March 2012

Today we discussed artist promotion other than the traditional music video and band website. This led us to the conclusion that we should utilise social networks to aid the promotion and have a platform where fans can interact with the artist. We will create a Facebook group and a twitter account for the band.

Digipak Advert - 1st Draft

12th of March 2012

Today we had a group discussion about our digipak. After looking at the first draft and reviewing our research into digipak posters we felt that while it followed our plan and followed the conventions and codes we saw in our research, it didn't seem fitting with the brand and style we had built and so some tweaks and re-assessment will take place to determine the changes we will make. 

9th of March 2012

Today we let people watch our finished video and filmed their feedback to edit into a video for question 2.

Photo Editing Process

27th of February 2012

Today we made a short list of photos we wanted to use from the photoshoot and began editing them using programmes like Photoshop

Making The Video/Blooper Reel

21st of February 2012

today we finished the edit of the music video and exported it from Final Cut using "quick time converstion" to get a file format that would work with PCs and YouTube as well as being able to edit all the settings such as:

•  H264 encoding
• Resolution: 1920x1080p
• sound quality: high
• video quality: high
• internet ready streaming: yes

17th February 2012

We started editing the blooper reel/making the video clip today.

15th February 2012

We began collecting outtakes and bloopers to make a blooper reel, as weel as showcase how we filmed the video.

Mockup of digipak advert/poster

Photoshoot

6th of February 2012

Today we worked on the flashback scenes for our music video, applying affects and colour correction

Slight Radial and Gaussian blurs added to create "hazy memory feel"

Image desaturated fully to achieve B&W

Analysis of band websites

From this we learnt about the codes and conventions of band websites, we can use this knowledge for our ancillary task and create an authentic band website.

Final Fonts Used

 To find special fonts that we wanted to use for a band logo, and thus create a brand we went to dafont[dot]com. a website that specialises in custom fonts that can be installed onto your iMac or PC and used in the same way as basic fonts like Times New Roman or Arial. We wanted to go for a font that looked distorted and damaged, to reflect the "grungy" and dirty element to their name - Contraband. As the connotations of contraband are illegal items such as drugs, guns, knives, or any good that can and is smuggled. Here is the shortlist we came up with.

1

2

3

4

5

In the end we decided to go with font 4 because it was the one that is distorted while still feeling contemporary and modern. Font 3 was dropped because we thought that the addition of barbed wire shaped lines through the font made it feel clichéd and contrived. Font 1 and 5 on the other hand looked very much like they had been typed by a typewriter and this didn't fit with the similar font used by our production company. The final deciding factor between font 2 and 4 came down to the fact that there was a consensus among the group that we like the ommision of holes in the font from some letters, such as O, R, A, B, and D.

Photoshoot Plan

Photo Shoot Planning Document

Shoot Date & Time	6th February 2012, 5pm
Image Description	Shots for digipack, CD cover and Website
Shoot Location	Epsom and Ewell high school in the main hall/ Old drama studio.
Model/person Contact details	Stephen Airey, Daniel Anstiss, Tom Daglish and Matthew Oates. 07504956079 – For all inquiry.
Lighting	Using the Espirit Gemini GM500, Flash gun and lighting gels.
Costumes	Skinny jeans, Band t-shirts, hoodie,  Van’s trainers (optional)
Plan of shots	Will emulate the band shots from Gun and Roses and You me at six. Will concentrate on close ups and high angle shots.

3rd of February 2012

today we did some more editing of the music video

Digipak Analysis

From this we learnt about the codes and conventions for digipaks, this means we can create a digipak that looks authentic and realistic and would not look out of place on the shelf of a record store. However we also learned about conventions we could break if we wanted to.

31st of January 2012

Today we talked about ideas and concepts for our music video, as well as going over the mise en scène we wanted. We then planned the shoot, preparing models and gaining permission from the property holder to use their premises for the shoot.

30th of January 2012

Today we began editing our video, putting together some band shots and narrative shots into a rough edit.

25th of January 2012

We filmed the last section of our video where we reach the climax and have the conflict, we went to the local park for this and used the bridge for some shots

Famous directors

Researching Special Effects

From this we learn about special effects that have been used before in student music videos and popular music videos. We found what worked and didn't work so well and the types of effects we could use.

Digipak Advertising Research

Best way to advertise an album on PhotoPeach.







From this short PhotoPeach presentation we learnt the forms and conventions of digipak advertising of an artist/band.

• brand
• all artists
• social media links
• links to web-stores e.g. iTunes, Amazon MP3
• ratings/reviews
• band website

When planning our advertisement we will adhere to these codes and conventions to ensure the branding of the band is consistent throughout all promotional activity

Our Production Company

We produced a logo for a production company after researching some others, and decided to go with a simple logo, in black and white, but has a twist to it by looking like a stencil, which leads to possible viral/guerilla marketing as we could easily turn it into a stencil and spray paint it onto walls etc. Here is the logo:

This logo will be used by the production company behind Contraband.  

13th of January 2012

Today we filmed the narrative sections of our video involving the first boyfriend alone.

10th of January 2012

Today we filmed part of the narrative sections of the video where the female character is with her new boyfriend, who together form the antagonist in our story, this is especially true of the girl, but there is a certain amount of dramatic irony to this, as the protagonist does not know she has a new boyfriend.

Branding

Branding

View more PowerPoint from TomBurlinson

From the branding research, we learnt that in order to create in niche in the music industry market, we need original ideas and that differentiated from other artists and music videos. 

6th of January 2012

Today we finalised our research on branding and as a group discussed what we wanted to achieve on our next day of filming - 13th of January, as well as contacting people to confirm that they are available and planning our days shoot.

Record Labels

From this we learn about the record industry and how it is structured. This greater understanding will help us in the creating of our ancillary tasks