Advert Final Cut

We are really pleased with the final cut of our advert and feel it is conventional to rock while also showing our brand very clearly. I feel it works well with both our digipack and advert as a clear campaine and band image.

We chose to just have our lead singer on the advert as it is conventional and was a main feature of a lot of the adverts we analysed. Through our research  and through making our own video, we know that this is because a lead singer, weather they be male or female is always the centre of attention. The fact our singer is a woman makes our band even more noticeable in the male dominated genre of rock. Our lead singer is looking directly at the camera engageing the audience (the reader of a magazine flipping pages) and so the image is more eye-catching.

Also, we tried to make our logo (our stylised sacred heart  the centre of attention both by placing in our singers hands and by adding a soft outer glow on Photoshop. We added a similar outer glow to the figure, the band logo and the picture of the album to hilight there importance. We feel this adds to the iconic look we were aiming for and makes the image bolder. In some ways this could be classed as a more rock-insperd version of Christ (or perhaps the virgin Mary, linking more to the Pretty Reckless' Video) offering his heart to humanity: this heart represents the singers music (which, as any would, she has poured her heart and soul into). Here she can be seen offering her heart/music to the audience of this advert, giveing them something personal and almost 'pure' (which i am sure any fan would respond well to).

By adding an image of the product we are selling we are making it very clear what we are selling, so there is no confusion for a reader. This is a convention of most music magazine adverts selling albums. We also chose to make the date a little bigger and bolder to make the text more interesting and to emphasise important information for the reader (who will not necessarily pay the advert lots of attention).

There is a similarity between our advert and the advert of 'Lungs' by Florence and the Machines as we have taken inspiration from the body-parts element of the image. 

Digipack Final Cut

We took inspiration for the cover of our digipack from The Pretty Reckless' album cover. We liked that this looked old and abused and we thought that it would look good with our type of song. We found an effect on Photoshop that created the worn out effect but in a more tidy way. We thought this looked good as the image doesn't look quite right which is reflected in the album name 'Goddess of Chaos'. 

We used mostly black and white for our digipack to give off a sense of darkness and light being mixed which is typical in rock. 

Throughout the digipack we continued the theme of the barbed wire (down the spine) and also the heart. I felt this was effective as it gave all of the products the sense that they came as a package. Also, the font is consistent in the advert and digipack.

We wanted to give the digipack a demonic feel to it because it would go well with our music video. We didn't want to use zombies again because all of the digipacks we have looked at don't use the same make-up on the artists in the music video and in the album. We thought instead we would use an effect which would look quite like decay and quite abused. We think that this worked well because it gave the whole digipack the zombie effect without actually using them.

Fonts

We decided to use a simple hand-written-looking font so that it would be easy to read but also because we thought it looked Rock-like. It is similar to a lot of other rock bands fonts and so we felt it would be appropriate to use.

Our Record Lable - Geffen

We decided to choose Geffen Records as our record label as after researching lots of rock record labels this  one seemed like the best choice. After looking at all the bands Geffen produces the records of we instantly knew we wanted our bands music to be recorded by this particular label. Some of the bands they have singed include:
- Areosmith
- Blink 182
- Guns N' Roses
- Misfits
- New Found Glory
- Papa Roach
- Rise Against
- Rob Zombie
... and many more...

Advert - Main Image

I tried to recreate my original sketch and am very pleased with the outcome. We used an outer glow effect on the heart to make it stand out and look more important/iconic. This effect, coupled with the rest of the image being black and white made it very clear that the heart is the most important element of the image.

Black and white images with elements of colour was going to be a running theme in our digipack and advert but halfway through creating our products we decided our work looked to crisp and clean, which did not work for our genre. Rock products usually have a worn out, destroyed look so we experimented with different filters on Photoshop before finalising our decision.

 

 To help us with our advert we asked some members of our target audience which image they liked better and why. Overall they decided the grim colours looked more professional than the black and white. They said they could appreciate the photo more as they could see the lead singer better. Although this is different to our original plans I agree with our research and think it looks good and makes our work more stylised and more conventional to rock.

Digipack - Photos, Colous and Effects

When we started to make out Digipack we struggled to make our images look conventional to rock. We felt they looked to neat and clean (the opposite to what our research told us they should be). We had found an image of an album by the Pretty Reckless that captured perfectly what we were trying to achieve. We liked how the image looked slightly grainy and distorted and was slightly scratched, making it look old and worn out.

We put our main digipack image on Photoshop and started experimenting with effects and filters before finally finding the effect we needed:

Photoshoot

Before our photo shoot we felt we needed a better knowledge of how to direct our models and so chose to look at how other rock bands, especially those with a female singer pose. We used Google to find some images that show conventional poses to help inspire us:

  
For the individual shots of Jess we looked at Taylor Momsen's typical poses, closeups of just her head and shoulders. we took note of the messy hair and angular shapes she makes with her body, in particular her arms and decided to direct Jess to do the same.


Because we wanted a more equal band (not just a lead singer with a nameless band behind her) we decided to focus more on Halestorm for the band poses as we feel they seem to have a sense of band-togetherness which the Pretty Reckless does not have. Here the lead singer is dressed the same as the rest of the band but is still at the forefront of the band. In some of the photographs she was leaning into the camera and we like this pose as it makes the image stand out.

With this in mind we took our photos:

Discordia Logo: Further Development

While experimenting with effects on Photoshop (while working on our advert) we altered our band name logo so that the bold, solid underlining faded out and became transparent at the bottom. We really like this effect as we think this logo better communicates the band. The font and design reflect the hardcore, masculine genre but the now softened line reflect the female front-woman adding a slightly more feminine feel to a previously manly logo.

Before

After

Final Cut

We are really proud of our final cut! We feel we have developed all of our ideas fully now and have come so far from our rough cut. The changes we made in the school scene, by replacing what we had by graphic matches, sets a very high standard at the beginning of our video which hopefully is continued throughout. I think we have produced a meaningful, entertaining and professional looking product.

Overall we think our video runs very smoothly and is filmed and edited in a way apropreate to our genre. There are lots of similarities between our video and those we analysed at the very beginning of our project. We are very happy with the way it turned out and everyone we have shown it to have responded with positive and supportive feedback. The most satisfying outcome thing to come from our video is the responses we get from our our audience, as people seem genuanly entertained and fascinated when watching it.

Ending: Suggested Suicide

After we'd filmed the suicide scene again, our teacher pointed out that suicide was illegal. We thought that we would have to change the ending just a couple of days away from the deadline as we are unable to show anything illegal or inappropriate. However, after some research, we found out that actually suicide was illegal until the Suicide Act in 1961 where it was decided that those who did not succeed in the attempt would no longer be prosecuted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Act_1961

We were overjoyed by this discovery as it meant we could keep our current ending which means that we have more time to concentrate on the other scenes that need attention.

Band Name Logo

We had a basic idea of what we wanted our band name logo to look like (from the already existing band logos we looked at) but we soon found out that finalising our own was a lot more complicated! 

1st Draft

We liked the bold, dark colours, conventional of rock, and knew we needed to incorporated a third colour to add a more impact to our title so it looks a little less 2D. We didn't think the red quite captured the look we were going fore and the overall effect looks very flat.

2nd Draft

For the next draft we took away the red, keeping it simple. We added a slight grainy effect to the grey to give the effect of shadow or perhaps even dirt. We liked this as we feel it reflects the dark and sometimes scruffy conventions of rock. Although we liked this we still felt we needed to neaten it up.

3rd Draft

We also decided to take away the colour from the moon shaped 'C'. The letter 'C' in our title is in the middle of the word and already has attention drawn to it due to its shape. Something we have learnt thorough out this project is not to do anything half-heartedly so we dicided to make it stand out even more  In our advert and digipak we are considering the idea of making the moon transparent to add that little extra something to our logo.

Final Draft

Re-filming Narrative - School Scene (2)

We felt the school scene was the weakest scene in our video and so tried to think of ways to stylize it to make it look more professional. After an in depth discussion including peers and teachers we came up with the idea of a series of graphic matches (or graphic graphic matches as our teachers came to call them), in which a student is doing something completely normal but the shot then cuts to them doing something violent or gory as a zombie.
I drew up a quick story board to help us visualise what we are doing:

The filming itself went very well. We worked out a system where we would film one or two students at a time around the desk in a way that allowed us to keep the actors with their zombie make up done already out of the shot. Our two mane conserns while filming were:

1 - actors move as little as possible while there makeup is being done

2 - DON'T MOVE THE CAMERA! 

This was possibly the most challenging thing we have done, not only in this project, but in the whole of our media course to date. It was essential that we got everything right first time as we only had one chance to do it. We were sure to brief our actors beforehand, telling them what we were doing and why and trying to explain what it would look like after it had been edited. It was essential for our actors to understand this so they had a better understanding of what we were trying to achieve and what we were asking of them.

I think the filming went very well and we are really pleased with how similar the shots turned out:

We linked each graphic match with an extreme close up of Emma's eyes so we could edit this footage like a series of eye line matches, this will help our audience see the world through our protagonists eyes. 

Overall this scene went very well and a little part of me cant believe we actually pulled it off! this scene really challenged are organisational skills, attention to detail (like meis en scene and the slightest camera movements), special effects skills and editing skills. We are really pleased we took this last minuet risk as it really pays off and makes our video look so much more proffetional (as well as helping it make a lot more scene).

Re-filming - Performance

I feel this shoot went really well as we had considered the fine details such as lighting and set design as well as the more obvious like camera angles and movements and basic mise en scene.
Because our last shoot was overexposed (which made our video look very unprofessional and became an issue when editing) Catherine was taught by David, our lights technician, how to use the lighting equipment in the drama hall so we could get it perfect. This worked out much better for us as we had a much clearer idea what sort of lighting we wanted than David did.

We added much more decoration to our performance, partly due to having a clearer idea of what our target audience wants, and partly because we have developed our project ideas dramatically in the past couple of weeks. We decided to add a logo on the drum kit, a convention of band performance of every genre. By putting a heart on the drums we played with the idea of a 'beating heart' suggesting that even though the drums are always in the background they are a vital element of a band and are the heart of this bands dynamic.


We also found perfect blood red leaves which we scatted at the feet of our band, as leaves and autumn are a recurring feature of our video, representing the decay of nature similar to the decay of the human body and mind.






Although we had included the conventional close ups on our lead singer we decided to include closeups on our bands faces, to give the other band members a more active role in there music video. This makes the video more realistic as although the lead singer of a rock band is always the center of attention they would be nothing without the music, including the people playing them - in our new cut we made an effort to reflect this in the video.
We tried to include them early on in the video to act almost as an establishing shot of each band member.

Because our last set was so plain we added a simple background to add a but more depth to the proformance. We built up the rostra in the drama hall and draped red ribbon and fabric across it to represent blood. we have tried to make this rather violent concept quite feminine by using soft imagery. In some ways the industrial rostra represents the men in the band and the fabric represents our female lead who, even though she is outnumbered is still the center of attention.